Much to my surprise, a quick search reveals that there's next to no discussion about processes/techniques for printing out your own cards. It might be a touchy subject since the process of printing moderately realistic versions of your own card designs can be applied to printing out counterfeit versions of actual cards, but assuming in good faith the members of MTGsalvation won't use any knowledge gleaned from this discussion for nefarious deeds...
Has anyone here attempted to print out the cards/sets that they've designed? A while back I designed a Neon Genesis Evangelion (it's an anime... don't ask) themed set. Once finished, I contemplated trying to get it printed by one of several companies that print custom trading cards, but with many requiring very large bulk orders I ultimately deemed it too expensive. Instead, I printed it all in B&W with my work's laser printer onto plain paper. With some print setting finagling, I was able to get cards that were the proper 2.5 x 3.5" size of actual MTG cards... but they were all backless except for one DFC that took a few print attempts to get right. I even came up with my own foldable booster pack packaging, and I ultimately assembled a booster box's worth of packs. It was cute, but now I'm aiming to step up my game.
I want to remake my set from scratch, and I also plan to evolve my printing process so that I can create versions of my cards that don't require being sleeved with an actual card behind it providing firmness.
Here's my equipment:
Printer - HP Color Laserjet Pro M252dw. Cheap (for a laser printer), color (that's not half-bad for a laser printer), auto-duplexing (a must for card backs & DFCs).
Software - MSE (obviously), Paint.net (I add in card artwork post-MSE since MSE turns it into low-res JPEG artifact soup), PagePlus X7 (for creating my print sheets... makes getting the card print size perfect a snap, not to mention making card backs and DFCs a breeze too!)
Guillotine trimmer* - Scissors, which is what I used before, just don't cut it when you need nice perfectly clean edges... plus they're a lot slower even if they did.
Corner cutter* - Neither scissors or the guillotine are even remotely effective for rounding card corners.
Paper* - 110lb weight cardstock (not sure how this compares to actual cards yet), and white of course... though I am investigating foil paper/cardstock for, well, foils. (Anyone got any leads?)
(* denotes items I have ordered but haven't yet recieved)
While I wait for my orders to come in, I've been making some test prints to the glossy paper I have handy. It's going quite well... as aforementioned, the auto-duplexing of the printer (plus desktop publishing software magic) makes it extremely easy to do card backs that align beautifully with the front sides, nevermind all the DFC possibilities. I might post some pictures of the results later if anyone's interested.
Has anyone here attempted to print out the cards/sets that they've designed?
Yes. I wrote a detailed summary of my processes and results in this article
I want to remake my set from scratch, and I also plan to evolve my printing process so that I can create versions of my cards that don't require being sleeved with an actual card behind it providing firmness.
Your going to have to use thicker paper then, probably at 300gsm bond paper. Also annoyingly this means you can't use normal basic lands, thus greatly increasing the amount of cards you will have to print.
Otherwise I also detail some digital options for playtesting.
Great article. Though I'm mostly just concerned with the process/techniques of creating your own high-quality prints, not necessarily playtesting.
Good call on the paper thickness. I'm still learning all this paper terminology, so I had thought 110 lb basis weight = 300 gsm, but apparently there are different basic sizes depending on the paper type that factor into the basis weight... so the 110 lb cardstock actually comes out to being more like 200 gsm due to the basic size being index (25.5" x 30.5").
Ordered some more paper, this time with a basis weight of 110 lb cover (20" x 26") which comes out close to 300 gsm. Also ordered some 300 gsm metallic champagne cardstock... obviously won't give the impression of being a proper foil card, but I'm curious to see what the results look like anyway.
Nice, that looks pretty legit. Not sure I get the flavor of it being called the Bob Ross method, though.
Anyway, upon further investigation, it appears that my printer only officially supports up to 220 gsm paper. Though when my 300 gsm cardstock arrives, I'm still going to attempt to use it. Paper jams may ensue.
In the meantime, the 200 gsm cardstock I ordered has arrived. And so has my corner rounder & guillotine. So I might see how this 200 gsm stuff fares... definitely flimsier than a real card, but still card-like enough that it might be alright. I'll cut out 60 blank cards and see how well they can be shuffled without sleeves.
I feel like this has to be way more expensive than ordering a printing service.
I just placed an order last week from printerstudio for 54 tokens (front and back) and it was $15.18 shipped to me with no special offers or anything. Should be here in another week or two at most, but they seemed to have good reviews in the past, especially compared to artscow.
I am a little sad though that I just got an email from them today about either 40% off custom cards or $5 off any order. But I might use this as an excuse to design some more tokens and order more before my first batch even gets here.
Not really. It's ~$30 for 250 sheets of 300 gsm paper, which equates to 1.2 cents per card.
A full set of high yield toner cartridges will run me $360. Estimating yield is a little bit tricky, but the official approximate yield for mixed text/graphics pages is 2300... So let's say I get just a fifth of that in my usage. That's still 460 pages, or 230 card sheets. That's 2070 cards, meaning the toner cost per card is 17.4 cents.
We're now at 18.6 cents a card, which puts those 54 tokens at about $10. So it's pretty close, all other factors considered.
Irrelevant. MSE compresses the art images into .jpgs of unreasonable compression factor as soon as you add them to the card in the program. The .jpg export only ensures that the frame is compressed down to the same black hole as the artwork.
Irrelevant. MSE compresses the art images into .jpgs of unreasonable compression factor as soon as you add them to the card in the program. The .jpg export only ensures that the frame is compressed down to the same black hole as the artwork.
Yep, this. And of course I'm exporting as PNG.
My 300 gsm paper arrived today, and early tests are looking pretty good. Despite being 80 gsm over the maximum my printer is *supposed* to handle, I printed a blank page and it went through just fine... with one caveat: It won't auto duplex. And manual duplexing is resulting in worse front/back alignment (though the printer struggling with the excessive gsm probably also has something to do with it). I'll tinker with it a bit to see if I can crack it, but I might have to forgo printing card backs. This unfortunately would also mean no DFCs, but on the plus side I'd only be using half the toner per card, which would put them at 9.9 cents each.
The handful of test cards I've printed out look and feel solid (other than the aforementioned front/back misalignment). I tried mixing a test card and a few actual Magic cards together to see if I could tell the test card apart from the rest just by feel, and I couldn't do it... both sleeved or unlseeved.
Also, the 300 gsm metallic champagne paper also arrived and looks good too. It gives cards a sparkly sheen and makes colors a bit warmer, which looks pretty cool but it's also fairly subtle. I expected the paper to only be shiny on one side, but it's shiny on both... which of course means that you can't use cards printed on this stuff together with ones printed on regular cardstock unsleeved. But that's fine.
I found some other toner solutions for my printer that are significantly cheaper than official HP-branded ones while still providing comparable yield and quality. My toner cost is now $130 instead of $360, a rather large difference.
Also taking into account the fact that printing well-aligned cardbacks at the moment seems like a no-go, halving our toner usage by simply not printing anything on back seems like the way to go. So instead of getting approximately 2070 cards out of our toner cartridges, we're looking at 4140.
So let's math this up... $130 in toner gets us 4140 cards. That's 3.1 cents apiece in toner per card. Add in our unchanged 1.2 cents per card for paper, and we come to a very cheap 4.3 cents/card grand total. Those 54 tokens now run us about $2.32 to produce.
Now certainly there are other factors: initial setup cost, your time and effort, the power consumption of your computer and printer, the fact that you personally have to eat the cost of any mistakes you might make, and of course the quality of the final product won't be on par with having them done professionally (they'll have card backs, for starters!)... but at the end of the day, doing it yourself seems like it will overall be the most economical solution if you want to produce high yields. Approximately 1000 cards will be around the tipping point where you start saving money by doing it yourself... which isn't all that far-fetched an amount. Printing an entire playset's worth of a large Magic set you designed will just about get you there. And if you've already got a printer, then you're pretty much past the tipping point already since that's by far the most expensive initial cost.
*UPDATE*
So, after much searching... I've found paper that seems just perfect for making premium cards. Not quite 300 gsm, but at 286 it'll be close enough. White on the reverse side, so in theory one could print a regular-looking non-shiny back onto it, and well it just plain looks the part perfectly:
Of course, there's a catch... it's EXPENSIVE! $363 for 100 sheets.
But... there's a catch to that. The sheets are MASSIVE! 28x40"... or almost 12 times the area of an 8.5x11" sheet. With a regular sheet yielding 9 cards, hypothetically these sheets would yield you 108 cards. Of course you have to factor in the fact that you have to cut these sheets up into sizes a consumer-grade printer can handle, which will cause margins to start eating away at your useable area... so we'll say that one sheet will yield 90, 10x a regular sheet.
Basically, 1 sheet of this is equivalent to 10 regular sheets. And all of a sudden, that price tag doesn't seem quite as insane as it once did. 100 sheets will yield about 9000 cards... price per card would be a mere 4 cents.
Still, $363, 9000 cards... it's total overkill. But now that I know this stuff exists, I can try and find it cheaper elsewhere... maybe in lower quantity, or smaller sized sheets.
Has anyone here attempted to print out the cards/sets that they've designed? A while back I designed a Neon Genesis Evangelion (it's an anime... don't ask) themed set. Once finished, I contemplated trying to get it printed by one of several companies that print custom trading cards, but with many requiring very large bulk orders I ultimately deemed it too expensive. Instead, I printed it all in B&W with my work's laser printer onto plain paper. With some print setting finagling, I was able to get cards that were the proper 2.5 x 3.5" size of actual MTG cards... but they were all backless except for one DFC that took a few print attempts to get right. I even came up with my own foldable booster pack packaging, and I ultimately assembled a booster box's worth of packs. It was cute, but now I'm aiming to step up my game.
I want to remake my set from scratch, and I also plan to evolve my printing process so that I can create versions of my cards that don't require being sleeved with an actual card behind it providing firmness.
Here's my equipment:
Printer - HP Color Laserjet Pro M252dw. Cheap (for a laser printer), color (that's not half-bad for a laser printer), auto-duplexing (a must for card backs & DFCs).
Software - MSE (obviously), Paint.net (I add in card artwork post-MSE since MSE turns it into low-res JPEG artifact soup), PagePlus X7 (for creating my print sheets... makes getting the card print size perfect a snap, not to mention making card backs and DFCs a breeze too!)
Guillotine trimmer* - Scissors, which is what I used before, just don't cut it when you need nice perfectly clean edges... plus they're a lot slower even if they did.
Corner cutter* - Neither scissors or the guillotine are even remotely effective for rounding card corners.
Paper* - 110lb weight cardstock (not sure how this compares to actual cards yet), and white of course... though I am investigating foil paper/cardstock for, well, foils. (Anyone got any leads?)
(* denotes items I have ordered but haven't yet recieved)
While I wait for my orders to come in, I've been making some test prints to the glossy paper I have handy. It's going quite well... as aforementioned, the auto-duplexing of the printer (plus desktop publishing software magic) makes it extremely easy to do card backs that align beautifully with the front sides, nevermind all the DFC possibilities. I might post some pictures of the results later if anyone's interested.
Yes. I wrote a detailed summary of my processes and results in this article
Your going to have to use thicker paper then, probably at 300gsm bond paper. Also annoyingly this means you can't use normal basic lands, thus greatly increasing the amount of cards you will have to print.
Otherwise I also detail some digital options for playtesting.
Are you designing commons? Check out my primer on NWO.
Interested in making a custom set? Check out my Set skeleton and archetype primer.
I also write articles about getting started with custom card creation.
Go and PLAYTEST your designs, you will learn more in a single playtests than a dozen discussions.
My custom sets:
Dreamscape
Coins of Mercalis [COMPLETE]
Exodus of Zendikar - ON HOLD
Good call on the paper thickness. I'm still learning all this paper terminology, so I had thought 110 lb basis weight = 300 gsm, but apparently there are different basic sizes depending on the paper type that factor into the basis weight... so the 110 lb cardstock actually comes out to being more like 200 gsm due to the basic size being index (25.5" x 30.5").
Ordered some more paper, this time with a basis weight of 110 lb cover (20" x 26") which comes out close to 300 gsm. Also ordered some 300 gsm metallic champagne cardstock... obviously won't give the impression of being a proper foil card, but I'm curious to see what the results look like anyway.
Completed sets:
Iamur — The Underwater Set
Overworld — Pirates vs. Octopuses
Esparand — The Sands of Time
Unfinished Sets:
Siege of Ravnica — Eldrazi in Ravnica
Shandalar — The Mana Set
Iamur Reimagined — Iamur v2
You can find more creative projects on my page Antaresdesigns!
Anyway, upon further investigation, it appears that my printer only officially supports up to 220 gsm paper. Though when my 300 gsm cardstock arrives, I'm still going to attempt to use it. Paper jams may ensue.
In the meantime, the 200 gsm cardstock I ordered has arrived. And so has my corner rounder & guillotine. So I might see how this 200 gsm stuff fares... definitely flimsier than a real card, but still card-like enough that it might be alright. I'll cut out 60 blank cards and see how well they can be shuffled without sleeves.
I just placed an order last week from printerstudio for 54 tokens (front and back) and it was $15.18 shipped to me with no special offers or anything. Should be here in another week or two at most, but they seemed to have good reviews in the past, especially compared to artscow.
I am a little sad though that I just got an email from them today about either 40% off custom cards or $5 off any order. But I might use this as an excuse to design some more tokens and order more before my first batch even gets here.
A full set of high yield toner cartridges will run me $360. Estimating yield is a little bit tricky, but the official approximate yield for mixed text/graphics pages is 2300... So let's say I get just a fifth of that in my usage. That's still 460 pages, or 230 card sheets. That's 2070 cards, meaning the toner cost per card is 17.4 cents.
We're now at 18.6 cents a card, which puts those 54 tokens at about $10. So it's pretty close, all other factors considered.
Presumably because it was created by someone named "Bob Ross" ... https://youtu.be/R5HpNQ5ozyc
Irrelevant. MSE compresses the art images into .jpgs of unreasonable compression factor as soon as you add them to the card in the program. The .jpg export only ensures that the frame is compressed down to the same black hole as the artwork.
Completed sets:
Iamur — The Underwater Set
Overworld — Pirates vs. Octopuses
Esparand — The Sands of Time
Unfinished Sets:
Siege of Ravnica — Eldrazi in Ravnica
Shandalar — The Mana Set
Iamur Reimagined — Iamur v2
You can find more creative projects on my page Antaresdesigns!
Yep, this. And of course I'm exporting as PNG.
My 300 gsm paper arrived today, and early tests are looking pretty good. Despite being 80 gsm over the maximum my printer is *supposed* to handle, I printed a blank page and it went through just fine... with one caveat: It won't auto duplex. And manual duplexing is resulting in worse front/back alignment (though the printer struggling with the excessive gsm probably also has something to do with it). I'll tinker with it a bit to see if I can crack it, but I might have to forgo printing card backs. This unfortunately would also mean no DFCs, but on the plus side I'd only be using half the toner per card, which would put them at 9.9 cents each.
The handful of test cards I've printed out look and feel solid (other than the aforementioned front/back misalignment). I tried mixing a test card and a few actual Magic cards together to see if I could tell the test card apart from the rest just by feel, and I couldn't do it... both sleeved or unlseeved.
Also, the 300 gsm metallic champagne paper also arrived and looks good too. It gives cards a sparkly sheen and makes colors a bit warmer, which looks pretty cool but it's also fairly subtle. I expected the paper to only be shiny on one side, but it's shiny on both... which of course means that you can't use cards printed on this stuff together with ones printed on regular cardstock unsleeved. But that's fine.
Also taking into account the fact that printing well-aligned cardbacks at the moment seems like a no-go, halving our toner usage by simply not printing anything on back seems like the way to go. So instead of getting approximately 2070 cards out of our toner cartridges, we're looking at 4140.
So let's math this up... $130 in toner gets us 4140 cards. That's 3.1 cents apiece in toner per card. Add in our unchanged 1.2 cents per card for paper, and we come to a very cheap 4.3 cents/card grand total. Those 54 tokens now run us about $2.32 to produce.
Now certainly there are other factors: initial setup cost, your time and effort, the power consumption of your computer and printer, the fact that you personally have to eat the cost of any mistakes you might make, and of course the quality of the final product won't be on par with having them done professionally (they'll have card backs, for starters!)... but at the end of the day, doing it yourself seems like it will overall be the most economical solution if you want to produce high yields. Approximately 1000 cards will be around the tipping point where you start saving money by doing it yourself... which isn't all that far-fetched an amount. Printing an entire playset's worth of a large Magic set you designed will just about get you there. And if you've already got a printer, then you're pretty much past the tipping point already since that's by far the most expensive initial cost.
*UPDATE*
So, after much searching... I've found paper that seems just perfect for making premium cards. Not quite 300 gsm, but at 286 it'll be close enough. White on the reverse side, so in theory one could print a regular-looking non-shiny back onto it, and well it just plain looks the part perfectly:
http://www.thepapermillstore.com/kromekote-silver-rainbow-paper-28-x-40-in-13-pt-cover-metallic-c-1s-100-per-package.html
Of course, there's a catch... it's EXPENSIVE! $363 for 100 sheets.
But... there's a catch to that. The sheets are MASSIVE! 28x40"... or almost 12 times the area of an 8.5x11" sheet. With a regular sheet yielding 9 cards, hypothetically these sheets would yield you 108 cards. Of course you have to factor in the fact that you have to cut these sheets up into sizes a consumer-grade printer can handle, which will cause margins to start eating away at your useable area... so we'll say that one sheet will yield 90, 10x a regular sheet.
Basically, 1 sheet of this is equivalent to 10 regular sheets. And all of a sudden, that price tag doesn't seem quite as insane as it once did. 100 sheets will yield about 9000 cards... price per card would be a mere 4 cents.
Still, $363, 9000 cards... it's total overkill. But now that I know this stuff exists, I can try and find it cheaper elsewhere... maybe in lower quantity, or smaller sized sheets.