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I have made up some custom MtG cards, and I am trying to get physical copies made (to mess with my friends, and for casual use). Does anyone know where I can get them made?

Disclamer: These cards will be clearly fake, and for personal use only. I'm not trying pull any shenanigans here. In the interest of openness, a graphical list of the cards can be found here. The back will be a custom back that I am still working on...

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  • print pictures of cards. glue them to real cards.
    – Sam I am says Reinstate Monica
    Commented Feb 11, 2013 at 15:16
  • 1
    Putting them in opaque sleeves in front of a real card of the same color in the way to go. The massive savings I got from proxying justified paying $35 for 600 sleeves in my case. :)
    – Gordon Gustafson
    Commented Feb 17, 2013 at 17:34
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    A word of advice: Do not glue them! I've tried a couple different kinds of glue on my custom cards and you it generally warps the card, making it unusable. A sleeve and a real card backer is the way to go.
    – Discord
    Commented Jan 6, 2014 at 14:51
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    @Discord, spray-on adhesive works fine without warping the card. The main problem with gluing onto an existing card is that you're going to change the card's thickness.
    – Brian S
    Commented Jan 29, 2014 at 14:59

2 Answers 2

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I've printed decks to playtest with friends before buying the actual cards. I just went to a local print shop. Everywhere has one.

I didn't bother printing backs. I just sleeved the cards. For rigidity, I backed them with real cards or those silly advertisement cards you get in booster packs. As long as you do that for every card in the deck, it should shuffle correctly.

I use the images from magiccards.info since they have a higher resolution than Gatherer's. To get the cards to display right, I create an .html file with the following content and print it to a PDF using my browser.

<style>
IMG {
   height: 3.46875in;
   width:  2.46875in;
}
</style>

<img src="image1.jpg"
><img src="image1.jpg"
><img src="image1.jpg"
><img src="image1.jpg"
><img src="image2.jpg"
><img src="image2.jpg"
><img src="image2.jpg"
><img src="image2.jpg"
...
>
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  • I've added to my answer.
    – ikegami
    Commented Feb 10, 2013 at 0:07
  • At the bottom of an individual card's page on magiccards.info, there are a handful of links under the heading "Print Proxies". Clicking the +1 through +4 links will build up a page of proxies to print, while View/Clear does exactly what you'd expect. So long as your browser/printer doesn't resize the resulting page, the images print at the correct size for proxies; there's no need to roll your own.
    – Brian S
    Commented Jan 29, 2014 at 15:03
  • @Brian S, That places a gap between them for me. Not a biggie for proxies, I suppose.
    – ikegami
    Commented Jan 29, 2014 at 16:50
  • I found that vertical spaces were created between rows. I was able to get rid of them by wrapping the img tags in a div with the row-height:0 style. moock.org/blog/archives/000309.html
    – intuited
    Commented Mar 27, 2015 at 23:21
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If you're looking to get the correct thickness for the cards, ask the print shop to print them on 14-point paper, or whatever they have in stock that requires a printer drum to have a rating of just over 300 psi. Through some experimentation at my job and a bit of research, I've discovered that to be the thickness of all trading cards. If they don't have a machine with a drum that can handle it, they'll know someone in the area that will.

Keeping in line with ikegami's comment, I would recommend not printing a back on the cards unless you expect them to be unsleeved for any great length of time. The price of the paper is, relatively, marginal; it will generally cost a dollar's worth of cardstock to print a large number of cards. However, tonor is really expensive, and it'll easily be 80-85% of your total project cost.

My one other recommendation would be to cut the cards yourself. Unless you personally know the person cutting out the cards, you'll most likely get unseemly white edges and the occasional slanted cut, especially if their cutting machine is slightly off.

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