Am I the only one who finds the banlist a little... wishy-washy?
From the website: "These cards (and others like them) should not be played..."
"And others like them"? That's extremely vague. You can't really expect that people are going to be like "Hmm, is Gaea's Cradle banned?... *checks banlist* Okay cool, it's not. But is it too much like any of the cards that ARE banned? ...Why yes, it's very similar in effect and power level as Tolarian Academy, a card from the same cycle! I guess I'd better not use it!"
So I just had someone ragequit on me in a Legacy game on MTGO because I was running two copies of Crumble to Dust in a slow not-fit-for-Legacy jank deck and managed to hit his Simic Growth Chamber with one on T3.
He tried telling me that I belonged in the "Getting Serious" skill level instead of "Just for Fun", because running any land destruction automatically makes your deck not casual.
I personally found this absurd... what's next, counterspells are not casual? Discard isn't casual? Doing anything your opponent doesn't like isn't casual?
But he insisted that everybody knows that land destruction isn't allowed in casual, like it's some unspoken rule. What do you guys think?
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.
^Well that play mat is a very young looking girl with not much covering her gentials. I think all the sleeves are fine but we do go to game stores to play games, which may or may not come along with children in the store, not to come face to face with underage looking skimpiness, frankly. (This is actually coming from a liberal, go figure.)
Playmat doesn't look like a young girl to me. Body curves and shape are NOT a immature female form.
Cute and innocent-looking is a combination that causes a lot of people to automatically assume that an anime girl is around kindergartner-age regardless of how they are actually proportioned, for some reason. I guess anyone older than a kid isn't allowed to look innocent these days, right?
But to be fair... in her original form, not the form depicted on my playmat, she does basically look like a little girl:
But even so, she's almost fairy-like. What kind of age would you put on, say, Tinkerbell for instance? I bet most westerners would rate Tinkerbell as being older than the character depicted on my playmat despite both basically having the same vaguely young, cute and innocent fairy-like appearance, simply because Tinkerbell is drawn in a western style.
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.
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.
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.
Personally, I myself probably wouldn't feel comfortable using my playmat publicly. Just a bit too much skin showing. Plus, Americans tend to underestimate ages of female anime characters. If she's cute and broadly young-looking, then she must be a kid and all of a sudden I'm a pedophile.
But it is worth noting that it's an officially licensed playmat for a TCG called Wixoss, and the character is basically that TCG's Jace (in the sense of being the poster boy/girl). That particular TCG is Japan only, but there's also the TCG Force of Will which is growing in popularity in the west and features a lot of revealing artwork... so that raises the question: Where do you draw the line? Certain artwork is okay on the cards, but not if it's on your sleeves/playmats?
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.
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.
So I just returned to the United States a few weeks ago after having lived in Japan for the past 3 years, and while over there I started playing Magic and also I acquired a large assortment of anime-themed gaming accessories. Since I mostly just played with a small group of friends, appropriateness wasn't really a concern when choosing my accessories... so before I seek out a local LGS, I'd like to make sure I'm not bringing anything too obscene or offensive.
Most of my sleeves I'd say are fairly tame and aren't any worse than having some Liliana ones, but Americans seem to have gotten particularly delicate while I was off in hentai heaven... so my perception is probably shot. Thus I'd like to request anyone willing to cast judgement to please do so:
From the website: "These cards (and others like them) should not be played..."
"And others like them"? That's extremely vague. You can't really expect that people are going to be like "Hmm, is Gaea's Cradle banned?... *checks banlist* Okay cool, it's not. But is it too much like any of the cards that ARE banned? ...Why yes, it's very similar in effect and power level as Tolarian Academy, a card from the same cycle! I guess I'd better not use it!"
He tried telling me that I belonged in the "Getting Serious" skill level instead of "Just for Fun", because running any land destruction automatically makes your deck not casual.
I personally found this absurd... what's next, counterspells are not casual? Discard isn't casual? Doing anything your opponent doesn't like isn't casual?
But he insisted that everybody knows that land destruction isn't allowed in casual, like it's some unspoken rule. What do you guys think?
Never drafted cube before, and I don't play much Vintage, Legacy or even Modern. Oh, and I only draft new sets once, maybe twice.
So yeah.
Anyway, without further ado, here's my cube:
1x Herald of Anafenza
1x Isamaru, Hound of Konda
1x Planar Guide
1x Containment Priest
1x Eight-and-a-Half-Tails
1x Knight of the White Orchid
1x Serra Avenger
1x Thalia, Guardian of Thraben
1x Brimaz, King of Oreskos
1x Masako the Humorless
1x Mentor of the Meek
1x Order of Whiteclay
1x Bonescythe Sliver
1x Essence Sliver
1x Hokori, Dust Drinker
1x Linvala, Keeper of Silence
1x Michiko Konda, Truth Seeker
1x Rhox Faithmender
1x Pulmonic Sliver
1x Angelic Skirmisher
1x Constricting Sliver
1x Darien, King of Kjeldor
1x Mikaeus, the Lunarch
1x Yosei, the Morning Star
White Artifact Creature
1x Ethersworn Canonist
White Artifact
1x Scourglass
White Instant
1x Scout's Warning
1x Silence
1x Swords to Plowshares
1x Tithe
1x White Sun's Zenith
White Sorcery
1x Launch the Fleet
1x Balance
1x Shahrazad
1x Retribution of the Meek
1x Armageddon
1x Ravages of War
1x Hallowed Burial
1x Martial Coup
1x Return to the Ranks
1x Entreat the Angels
White Enchantment
1x Moat
1x Worship
1x Boon Reflection
White Enchantment Artifact
1x Spear of Heliod
Blue Creature
1x Galerider Sliver
1x Realmwright
1x Chief Engineer
1x Gilded Drake
1x Harbinger of the Tides
1x Lord of Atlantis
1x Master of the Pearl Trident
1x Phantasmal Image
1x Shapesharer
1x Ambassador Laquatus
1x Thada Adel, Acquisitor
1x Talrand, Sky Summoner
1x Azami, Lady of Scrolls
1x Meloku the Clouded Mirror
1x Synapse Sliver
1x Arcanis the Omnipotent
1x Consecrated Sphinx
1x Keiga, the Tide Star
1x Tomorrow, Azami's Familiar
1x Uyo, Silent Prophet
Blue Artifact Creature
1x Master of Etherium
1x Master Transmuter
1x Phyrexian Metamorph
Blue Artifact
1x Mindlock Orb
Blue Instant
1x Ancestral Recall
1x Visions of Beyond
1x Cyclonic Rift
1x Mana Drain
1x Intuition
1x Mana Short
1x Force of Will
1x Sunder
Blue Sorcery
1x Time Walk
1x Donate
1x Tinker
1x Devastation Tide
1x Reduce to Dreams
1x Braingeyser
Blue Enchantment
1x Dictate of Kruphix
1x Treachery
1x Forced Fruition
Blue Enchantment Artifact
1x Bident of Thassa
Blue Enchantment Creature
1x Thassa, God of the Sea
Black Creature
1x Sleeper Agent
1x Bearer of Silence
1x Bloodghast
1x Kalastria Highborn
1x Kiku, Night's Flower
1x Leeching Sliver
1x Captivating Vampire
1x Dark Impostor
1x Maralen of the Mornsong
1x Syphon Sliver
1x Ashling, the Extinguisher
1x King Macar, the Gold-Cursed
1x Plague Sliver
1x Sangromancer
1x Toxin Sliver
1x Anowon, the Ruin Sage
1x Drana, Kalastria Bloodchief
1x Ghoulcaller Gisa
1x Ob Nixilis, the Fallen
1x Dread
1x Mikaeus, the Unhallowed
1x Kalitas, Bloodchief of Ghet
1x Maga, Traitor to Mortals
Black Instant
1x Dark Ritual
1x Entomb
1x Vampiric Tutor
Black Sorcery
1x Imperial Seal
1x Thoughtseize
1x Demonic Tutor
1x Diabolic Intent
1x Do or Die
1x Enter the Dungeon
1x Living End
1x Temporal Extortion
1x Hellfire
1x Patriarch's Bidding
1x Black Sun's Zenith
1x Overwhelming Forces
1x Leyline of the Void
1x Exquisite Blood
1x Polluted Bonds
1x Sanguine Bond
Black Enchantment Artifact
1x Whip of Erebos
Black Enchantment Creature
1x Erebos, God of the Dead
Red Creature
1x Goblin Guide
1x Vexing Devil
1x Bazaar Trader
1x Slobad, Goblin Tinkerer
1x Warren Instigator
1x Blade Sliver
1x Goblin Chieftain
1x Mannichi, the Fevered Dream
1x Squee, Goblin Nabob
1x Zo-Zu the Punisher
1x Diaochan, Artful Beauty
1x Ib Halfheart, Goblin Tactician
1x Jeska, Warrior Adept
1x Krenko, Mob Boss
1x Kurkesh, Onakke Ancient
1x Magma Sliver
1x Pia and Kiran Nalaar
1x Rakka Mar
1x Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker
1x Latulla, Keldon Overseer
1x Urabrask the Hidden
1x Capricious Efreet
1x Hellkite Tyrant
Red Artifact Creature
1x Moltensteel Dragon
Red Instant
1x Lightning Bolt
1x Fork
1x Chaos Warp
1x Flame Javelin
1x Kozilek's Return
1x Rush of Blood
1x Pact of the Titan
1x Comet Storm
1x Volcanic Geyser
1x Lavaball Trap
1x Searing Wind
Red Sorcery
1x Gamble
1x Last Chance
1x Wheel of Fate
1x Bonfire of the Damned
Red Enchantment
1x Braid of Fire
1x Blood Moon
1x Land's Edge
1x Leyline of Punishment
Red Enchantment Artifact
1x Hammer of Purphoros
Red Enchantment Creature
1x Purphoros, God of the Forge
Green Creature
1x Birds of Paradise
1x Noble Hierarch
1x Bloom Tender
1x Gyre Sage
1x Lotus Cobra
1x Manaweft Sliver
1x Rattleclaw Mystic
1x Horned Sliver
1x Hornet Nest
1x Predator Ooze
1x Bloodspore Thrinax
1x Elvish Piper
1x Fungus Sliver
1x Master of the Wild Hunt
1x Norwood Priestess
1x Oracle of Mul Daya
1x Tree of Redemption
1x Brood Sliver
1x Genesis
1x Vigor
1x Primordial Hydra
1x Liege of the Tangle
1x Living Hive
1x Vorinclex, Voice of Hunger
1x Myojin of Life's Web
Green Artifact
1x Birthing Pod
Green Instant
1x Natural Selection
1x Naturalize
1x Natural Affinity
Green Sorcery
1x Sylvan Tutor
1x Channel
1x Life from the Loam
1x Life's Legacy
1x Marshaling the Troops
1x Natural Order
1x Scapeshift
1x Plow Under
1x Green Sun's Zenith
1x New Frontiers
1x Tooth and Nail
1x Genesis Wave
Green Enchantment
1x Doubling Season
1x Primal Vigor
1x Mana Reflection
Green Enchantment Artifact
1x Bow of Nylea
Azorius
1x Godhead of Awe
1x Medomai the Ageless
1x Enchanted Evening
Dimir
1x Sire of Stagnation
1x Vela the Night-Clad
1x Shadow of Doubt
Rakdos
1x Boris Devilboon
1x Master of Cruelties
1x Everlasting Torment
Gruul
1x Omnath, Locus of Rage
1x Atarka's Command
1x Xenagos, God of Revels
Selesnya
1x Elderwood Scion
1x Fracturing Gust
1x Karametra, God of Harvests
Orzhov
1x Evershrike
1x Teysa, Envoy of Ghosts
1x Vindicate
Golgari
1x Lord of Extinction
1x Sisters of Stone Death
1x Pernicious Deed
Simic
1x Overbeing of Myth
1x Voidslime
1x Kruphix, God of Horizons
1x Spellbound Dragon
1x Niv-Mizzet, Dracogenius
1x Stitch in Time
Boros
1x Balefire Liege
1x Gisela, Blade of Goldnight
1x Energy Bolt
Colourless Creature
1x Eldrazi Mimic
1x Matter Reshaper
1x Endless One
1x Kozilek, the Great Distortion
1x Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger
1x Emrakul, the Aeons Torn
Colourless Artifact Creature
1x Hex Parasite
1x Metallic Sliver
1x Phyrexian Dreadnought
1x Arcbound Ravager
1x Arcbound Slith
1x Arcbound Stinger
1x Copper Gnomes
1x Spellskite
1x Steel Overseer
1x Burnished Hart
1x Etched Champion
1x Eater of Days
1x Silent Arbiter
1x Solemn Simulacrum
1x Etched Monstrosity
1x Psychosis Crawler
1x Stuffy Doll
1x Wurmcoil Engine
1x Platinum Angel
1x Platinum Emperion
1x Hangarback Walker
Colourless Artifact
1x Black Lotus
1x Lotus Bloom
1x Mox Emerald
1x Mox Jet
1x Mox Opal
1x Mox Pearl
1x Mox Ruby
1x Mox Sapphire
1x Zuran Orb
1x Candelabra of Tawnos
1x Sol Ring
1x Anvil of Bogardan
1x Defense Grid
1x Dolmen Gate
1x Doubling Cube
1x Hivestone
1x Scroll Rack
1x Chromatic Lantern
1x Crucible of Worlds
1x Fist of Suns
1x Forcefield
1x Horn of Greed
1x Unwinding Clock
1x Vedalken Orrery
1x Door to Nothingness
1x Lich's Mirror
1x Lifeline
1x Mycosynth Lattice
1x Darksteel Forge
Colourless Instant
1x Spatial Contortion
1x Warping Wail
1x Titan's Presence
1x Scour from Existence
Colourless Sorcery
1x Ancestral Vision
1x All Is Dust
Colourless Enchantment
1x Eldrazi Conscription
Colourless Land
1x Ancient Tomb
1x Arid Mesa
1x Azorius Chancery
1x Badlands
1x Bayou
1x Blasted Landscape
1x Bloodstained Mire
1x Boros Garrison
1x City of Brass
1x Dimir Aqueduct
1x Dust Bowl
1x Encroaching Wastes
1x Evolving Wilds
1x Flooded Strand
1x Forbidden Orchard
1x Ghost Quarter
1x Ghost Town
1x Golgari Rot Farm
1x Gruul Turf
1x Holdout Settlement
1x Izzet Boilerworks
1x Mana Confluence
1x Marsh Flats
1x Misty Rainforest
1x Orzhov Basilica
1x Plateau
1x Polluted Delta
1x Rakdos Carnarium
1x Savannah
1x Scalding Tarn
1x Scrubland
1x Selesnya Sanctuary
1x Simic Growth Chamber
1x Taiga
1x Tectonic Edge
1x Terramorphic Expanse
1x Tropical Island
1x Tundra
1x Underground Sea
1x Unknown Shores
1x Verdant Catacombs
1x Volcanic Island
1x Wasteland
1x Windswept Heath
1x Wooded Foothills
If you have any helpful critique to offer, I'm all ears.
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.
Cute and innocent-looking is a combination that causes a lot of people to automatically assume that an anime girl is around kindergartner-age regardless of how they are actually proportioned, for some reason. I guess anyone older than a kid isn't allowed to look innocent these days, right?
But to be fair... in her original form, not the form depicted on my playmat, she does basically look like a little girl:
But even so, she's almost fairy-like. What kind of age would you put on, say, Tinkerbell for instance? I bet most westerners would rate Tinkerbell as being older than the character depicted on my playmat despite both basically having the same vaguely young, cute and innocent fairy-like appearance, simply because Tinkerbell is drawn in a western style.
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.
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.
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.
But it is worth noting that it's an officially licensed playmat for a TCG called Wixoss, and the character is basically that TCG's Jace (in the sense of being the poster boy/girl). That particular TCG is Japan only, but there's also the TCG Force of Will which is growing in popularity in the west and features a lot of revealing artwork... so that raises the question: Where do you draw the line? Certain artwork is okay on the cards, but not if it's on your sleeves/playmats?
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.
Kuso Miso Technique, I believe.
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.
Most of my sleeves I'd say are fairly tame and aren't any worse than having some Liliana ones, but Americans seem to have gotten particularly delicate while I was off in hentai heaven... so my perception is probably shot. Thus I'd like to request anyone willing to cast judgement to please do so: