Hey guys, so i picked this card up, aside from the wear of the card i did notice that it looked like someone had ripped a piece of tape off the card removing some of the top layer, but after taking it out of the sleeve and feeling it, its completely smooth like it was finished over. While just looking at it, its blank white mark, but my camera shows somewhat of the holo effect on the card within the what im guessing is an error, maybe like a misprint or not enough ink? Im trying to reach out to any experts who might know something about it cause from my own research I haven’t found anything like this on any WOTC cards and especially a gengar, how rare is this if its even rare? It’s staying in my personal collection as I think its pretty cool and my first error card but what would this thing even be worth?
It’s just tape/damage. You can see similar types of ink loss with removal of tape, lamination, etc.
am i seeing this tight that where the obstruction is, there is no ink and the foil was still laid over properly? If the foil is applied the same as english stuff, I think this was an actual obstruction on the paper. Remained through the printing process and was removed before the foil applied.
Not sure about the missing text. If im completely wrong, someone correct me 
Are you saying like actually damage, cause there’s just no difference in texture at all
I’m not sure if I’m understanding your question right, but the foil isn’t layered on top of the ink (the foil is one of first layers, not the last). As far as I undersrand it, the printing is the same for most English and Japanese holos:
Holofoil → opaque white layer to block off the foil in areas you don’t want it → color printing
So the removal of the colored ink here by the tape (or lamination in examples linked above) leaves the opaque white layer that’s used to mask the foil.
Yeah, damage from tape removal or something like it. Looking at the condition of the rest of the card, I wouldn’t say this is too big a stretch 
You wouldn’t be able to feel the elevation difference of a missing layer of ink (unless you have supersenses 
).
Foil should be the top layer, ink os under foil . Thats how foil shifts happen. I don’t know if Japan does things different.
Oh, okay, so I was understanding right. No, holo shifts are due to a misalignment of the opaque white layer masking the foil. Foil is first is why you can acetone cards to remove ink and reveal the full foil cardstock below.
Edit: There should be threads on the card printing process here (I recall a good one, I think by @pfm?). I’ll link it if I have time to search.
The foil is part of the cardstock. The ink is laid on top. A white layer is laid down to determine which parts have the holo showing through:
You can see the ink stripped to the white layer there. The white layer being offset is what produces a holo shift.
For true obstruction errors, you basically are putting a foreign object between the sheet and the ink. You expect to see very clear presense or absence of layers like this
On the Gengar, the CMY colour layers have been removed and the black from the text partially removed. The text is an indication that this is almost certainly just damage (ie someone putting tape down and ripping it off) and not something that happened in the factory
Kind of hard to tell what’s happening here, but the cloudiness over the foil in the last picture makes me think it’s just some foreign substance (or the artifacts of some foreign substance) on the card, making the light reflect in an odd way, as seen in the second picture.
I think is some hardcore evidence for whatever caused the obstruction around the picture. Its odd how the missing foil wraps perfectly around the box at the bottom
The missing foil in the corner is really strange. If it were bleeding of the opaque white layer into areas it shouldn’t be in (thereby obstructing the foil), I don’t see why the odd shape would reflect in the surface gloss. If it were some weird defect in the original foil cardstock, it also shouldn’t leave any sort of artifact on the surface. The missing foil wrapping around the text box (like you mentioned) and the middle artifact just looking like a bit of cloudiness (nothing like the corner one) is also a bit strange.
Not sure what’s happening. Weird card, indeed. Might be worthy of its own thread to field theories on what’s happening.
Found the original thread discussing card printing I was thinking of, but it’s a video by pfm. But it gets all the points across about the printing process.
100% tape applied and removed, I’ve seen so many examples of these over the years.
Im not so sure it was a literal piece of tape that was peeled, sure the cards is rough shape, but it was stated the card was pulled out of the pack with that error intact, and if i took a pieice of tape, put it on paper, peeled it off i would clearly be able to define texture variations, there is none with that card, im not expert here but certainly confused lol
It may not have been tape, but it was something similar enough. The spwcific thing causing the missing ink is not really of consequence.
Many people misremember things. They aren’t always wrong, but you have to make a judgement call based on one person’s memory (perhaps even less trustworthy if they’re actively trying to sell the card to you) vs the experience and understanding of a number of people that have looked at cards for a long time.
If you’re talking about paper and ripping tape off of paper (and having some paper come off with the tape) and seeing how the structure of the paper is different and creates “texture,” that’s not the same scenario. This is more akin to (still a bad comparison, but maybe more apt) coloring with marker on marble and then taping that and ripping it off, taking some marker off with it. The marker adds no discernible “texture” to the marble, by touch; therefore, when the tape removes some marker off the marble, you will again be unable to discern any change in texture, because the original modification added no real texture anyway. There’s probably a better way to describe this, but the gist of it is that you can’t feel the presence or absence of layers of ink.
Many of us have chimed in already with the same conclusion: it’s damage. Any further confusion likely stems from trying to hold on to the idea that it’s a genuine error rather than ambiguity around what happened to this card.
