A couple things to keep in mind with these cards.
There exists other degrees of missing black ink on the affected area subjects.
Thomas missing little chips and pieces of his name, Marcus Lawton with small blackless pieces, etc. So there was some type of transition between the original plate/print flaw and correction. Or perhaps the minor missing-black cards were a precursor to the famous ones.
The green sheet subjects are also prone to missing black ink. Chris Gwynn, Roger Salkeld, Jerome Walton are a few I have pulled (from junk boxes/hand collated sets, not sealed product). These, like the orange sheet cards, are not faded or "going blackless" but missing smaller sized areas of the card's black print.
And last year a seller on ebay had found (on ebay) a full, uncut, blackless "dark blue" border sheet. No black ink whatsoever. He had them cut and sold off singles. I believe a Dale Murphy was the big name on that one. He may have a few commons up for sale still.
Oh and this is 100% second-hand information from almost 20 years ago but I was working in card shop and whenever the subject of errors or odd cards stuff came up, one of our regulars would tell a story about how he bought out a local arcade's vending machine stock of cards. He described them as machines that dispensed cards for $0.25 or $0.50 (don't recall qty or exact price). Anyway, he bought these cardboard boxes filled with junk, mostly 1990 Topps. He had sorted through them looking for Thomas and Juan Gonzalez, eventually he came across a Thomas and was "disappointed" to discover that it had most of his name printed on front. He described it as either missing the beginning or ending of his name (FRANK THOM ), I do not recall, but remember trying to visualize it. I've grilled him about this over the years and he claims it was never sold and sits buried in a box in storage.
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