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Posted By: davidcycleback

With an 1880s baseball lithograph printing plate, if there was damage they could fix it up. This might cause changes the graphics.

Even in the old, old days, famous artists like Durer and Rembrant changed the the original printing plate. Sometimes this was because the plate wore down from printing and detail had to be added. Sometimes it was because there was a new purpose and the text needed to be changed. Art historians date many famous old prints in part by the graphic changes, as they know when the plate changes were made. Even with Rembrandt era woodcuts, there were techniques to add plugs of wood to parts of the woodblock plate were miscut or otherwise damaged. So prints variations can come from the same, original printing plate.

As text, and perhaps border lines, are usually on its own printing plate, you can change the text without touching the player image plates. For the Magie error, the printers only had to quick fix the plate with names.