I was looking at my 1967 set and noticed something.
On my #1 card, "The Champs," there is a line of extraneous colors at the top, above the black border, that travels over half the width of the card. With its darker and lighter blue and purple hues, it appears to
(possibly) be a swath of area from the original photograph that was accidentally included and then edited out later. Probably something along those lines.
At first glance, it looked like the registration was off and the black plate was simply printed in the wrong area, but after comparing it with many, many versions of this same card, I can tell that that isn't the case. Nope, it's a distinct variation. Granted, it's nothing earth shattering and I usually prefer to collect variations that were a direct result of changes made to the card by the printers, but it's still pretty cool. And there's more. After an exhaustive search of ebay auctions, I found yet another version of this card. Here the colored area is more of a thin blue line that starts from off the left edge and only goes a short distance across. No way nearly as long as the first version.
Here is a pic of all three versions
(these cards are all from ebay):
First card - the 'correct' version with nothing but white above the black border.
Second card - the first variation I described above.
Third card -
(harder to see) the second variation I described above.
thechamps.jpg
Here's a closer view of the 2 variations. FYI: the second card is actually a different card than the one in the graphic above.
(It just shows up better and I had already done all the photoshop work on the original pic.)
thechampscloseup.jpg
From my searches, I can see that both of these are legitimate variations, as a few of each are present on ebay and at COMC. Based on said searches, it would appear the first version is very tough to find and the second version is even tougher to locate.
Again, nothing earth shattering here, but to fellow variations collectors a little something to add to the ever expanding need list.