Oh it’s real. Many sheets went uncut only to be cut later and some were even test cut for alignment purposes.
This card, along with a couple dozen more i have, came directly from Wizards as replacement cards. Back in 1999 I would send back 20 or so base set shadowed holos a week as defective which were usually replaced with shadowless cards…which is why I was doing it and also why I still have MANY hundreds of shadowless holos to this day;) Well, one week my replacements came and they were all shadowed square cuts.
Another top eBay seller got a few the exact same way. And there’s a couple of eBay sellers still around who got just shadowless the same way.
As a side note…after about 10/12 months the replacements started coming back normal shadowed cause we already emptied out the original replacement stock.
Hope that info helps:)