Brilliant, thank you all. @Air Power, I'm glad you're tracking the reprints. I had started to do this informally but grew bored by the time I got to Two Towers starter decks
Will this make it into the wiki somewhere?
I think the
Saruman's Chill is the most interesting from a technical
perspective. If both cards were indeed part of a true first print run, then there must have been an error in the printing for some (but not all) of that card. Otherwise, there were actually two printings of the first printing, and Decipher didn't want to change the label. As far as I know,
Saruman's Chill is the only card with the double twilight cost printing, and it will be consistent, say, in an entire booster box.
"A" remains a mystery to me:
If A = "alpha" why is the print date is later than the (1) printing (see above and below)?
I don't see how A can refer to errata'ed since there are no differences between cards in the few examples I've spotted (let alone that these cards have no reference to errata in the CRD/ruling docs). Here are two examples:
Sam, Son of Hamfast appears to have identical images, text, etc except for the 1|A|null indicator + date.
Same is true for
Uruk Rager:
I thought for a moment that perhaps the A indicated cards that came from certain Starters, but I couldn't validate that.