Desert Shield

[ALR-bishop]

Looking forward to your list Zach. I think I have more variant cards with my 1991 set than any other of my Topps sets, but I admit most are what I view as print defects

[Zach Wheat]

Originally Posted by ALR-bishop

Good info Zach. It had been my impression the majority of the DS cards never made it over seas, and that many did not even make it into the military supply chain. But I have no personal knowledge or hard fact about that.

There are of course a good many DS fakes out there too and it would seem if any variations are found one would have to be sure it is an actual DS card.

Originally Posted by ALR-bishop

Looking forward to your list Zach. I think I have more variant cards with my 1991 set than any other of my Topps sets, but I admit most are what I view as print defects

Al/Joe,

I have finished going over almost 8,000 1991 Topps Desert Shield cards and I am now convinced you are correct. I did not find any of the variations found in abundance in the 1991 Topps regular issue. I did not find stat corrections or variations on any card. That doesn't mean they don't exist - but if they do they must be rare. And I suspect if you find any variations it would exist only on the 6 cards listed below that were printed on sheet E/F. However, there are no known errors/variations for these cards.

Here is how I came to these conclusions. I was also able to compare the known variations list with the DS cards I had on hand - including sheets of cards - and found a few surprising items:

There were no duplicates on the printers sheets - all 792 cards were printed on 6 sheets, probably in 1 print run in equal number.

Print run designations were detailed on the reverse of the cards. For instance a card with an A* on the bottom of the reverse of each card near the copyright logo indicated the card was printed on sheet "A". There were 6 sheets used and each card correlates to a corresponding sheet code A-F. Every single card inspected had only 1 sheet code designation - except for 6 cards following. All of the cards that were printed on multiple sheets came from sheet F.

Cards #9 (Darrin Fletcher), # 87 (Tracy Jones), #233 (Al Leiter), #676 (Scott Chiamparino) and #696 (Steve Olin) had a Printer Sheet code of E*F*. However, I examined full uncut printer's sheets of Sheet F and all of these cards and every other cards inspected had the exact same sheet code designation. These 6 cards did not come with a print sheet code of either E or F - only E*F*. This was consistent with every duplicate card inspected as well.

Every card inspected for Card #5 (Cal Ripken) did not have a sheet code designation. However, inspection of the uncut Sheet F indicates this card also came from the same sheet - Sheet F. For what it is worth - the 5 cards noted above were all located adjacent to each other in a row.

The checklists for Desert Shield sets were also the "uncorrected' version over their 1991 Topps counterparts. The 6 checklists were printed on Sheet F - and the 3 checklists which have errors (#31, #366 & #527) were all uncorrected (see list in previous post for errors) on the uncut sheet.

I am guessing what this means is that we won't find any stat variations or error variations. Since we find 5 cards with EF print sheet designation and none of these cards had a single E or F sheet designation - I am guessing these the DS set was printed after corrections were made on the first 5 sheets (A-E) and sheet F was corrected after the DS print run ended.

As you are aware, 1991 Topps checklists do not have the DS logo. Even on the uncut printer's sheets. I suspect - but can't conclusively prove - that only the checklists that are "uncorrected" are true DS checklists.


Z Wheat

[4reals]

I suspect you are right Zach. The print code variations for the base 91 topps set would confirm your theory. The 5 cards you mentioned with an E*F* code can be found with F* codes but they are significantly more scarce compared to the other sheets that made the same type of sheet code corrections. This would support that the first 5 sheets were corrected much earlier in the run than sheet F and that other subsets like DS were printed in between these corrections.