Making High Quality MTG Proxies From Home - Start to Finish

0:00 All right. Today I'm going to be taking you through all the steps I go through to get beautiful homemade proxies for Magic the Gathering, including double-sided art. Let's get started. So, the first thing I do when I'm making any deck is I go to Architect. This is where I'll put my deck together. Uh, you can choose your arts on here as well if you'd like. You can choose community decks. Tons of different options here, but this is where I'll get my deck. From here, I'll go to extras, export deck. Uh for export options, I actually uncheck all, but you can include set code uh if you would like to get the art that you have uploaded on here to where the next step we're going. I'll click copy, and we'll go over to the next site. All right, so from here, you're going to go to proxy.com, p oxie d.com. On the left, you've got controls for uploading files from NPC fill. So this is for any of

0:45 your custom arts. You've also got a field here for entering any card names and quantities. This is how you'll get arts from Scryfall. You can include set number if you would like. On the right, you have a bunch of other controls. You have page width, page height. It's set to 8 and half by 11 by default, which is your standard piece of paper, columns, rows, uh, bleed, edge, color, and some guide settings. But we'll get to that in a minute. So, first we're just going to go ahead and paste the deck that I had. This is all of the cards from this list here. And we'll go ahead and click fetch cards. So, since I did 100 cards, this might actually take a minute. So, I will pause the video and once it's start or once it's done, I will come right back to you guys. Okay, so it's been about 30 seconds and I've got my full list of cards here now. So now would be a good time to show you guys what the controls on the right do. Um, if I were to change, let's say I can swap the orientation. So now we've got 11 by 8

1:31 and a half. Now I can go ahead and change columns to four and then I'll change rows to two. So this will just kind of change the orientation of your layout. I know a lot of people prefer to do 4x two uh when they're when they're printing cards, but for now we'll just go with 3x3. Okay, so we're back to default. I swapped the orientation back uh set columns and rows to three. So now I'll talk for a minute about bleed edge. Typically I'll just leave this at one. What this is is actually the space between cards. So it will change the amount of space between the cards that you have for leeway. So you can see if I set this to zero. There's no space. So you're going to go ahead and you're going to cut directly on the guides. And that'll be it. Reason you do bleed edge is it gives you a little bit more leeway when cutting. And it makes it so that you're more likely to get perfectly sized cards. So like

2:17 you want all your cards to be exactly the same size. Using these bleed edge guides makes it much easier when it comes to aligning everything. Something else I didn't mention is that you can actually just disable the guides altogether. Um, which will make it so that they're no longer visible. The only other things of note on the right here is you can change the guide color. So like if you prefer something like pink or white, you can do that. Uh, by default it's set to this neon green. I find that it's super easy to see when you're printing out these cards and going to cut later on. You also have a zoom control. This doesn't actually do anything in terms of uh affecting the print, but it's just for your viewport here. So, you can zoom in a little bit um with these buttons. As for the cars themselves, you have these little boxes up at the top right. You can click and drag these to reorder cards however you want. This is super useful for printing two-sided cards

3:02 since you have to do a lot of rearranging later on. Something else I'll show you while we're here is choosing files. So, if we click on choose files here and scroll down a little bit, I've got this Lind cheerful tormentor. I'll click upload and then all uploads always go to the bottom. So, if I scroll all the way down here, you'll see this lind. Uh, this is super cool. So, that you can get things like full heart cards or custom hearts from NPC fill. So, in order to get this one, all I would have done is gone over to NPC fill, open that up in another tab, jump into editor, add cards, text, and then you can type in whatever card you want here. So, if I type in Soul Ring, and click submit, you can see there are tons and tons and tons of arts to choose from. All right, so you also have the ability to right click any of these cards. On a Mac, it will be a two click. That'll open up a

3:47 context menu. Basically, you have the ability to duplicate or delete. So, I'm going to go ahead and delete this old link that we had here since we have a new one with a custom art. That'll remove it from the list. Uh, duplicate is also a function there. So, you can rightclick anything, duplicate it, and that will add it to the slot directly to the right of it. So, it'll move it down here to the bottom. Okay, so onto the fun part. Uh, for each of these cards, you can choose your own art. So, if you click on a card like Arcane Signant, it'll open up an artwork selection. This is all pulled directly from scryfall. So you can choose whatever art you want. Um, super fancy arts and all of these will dynamically add a bleed edge to them. So if they have rounded corners from scryfall, there's some math in here to straighten out those with a with a similar color to make it so that they look good once you cut them. Another cool feature is that uh proxy

4:33 will take edges that are close to black or near black and make them pure black. So, if you grab an image from Scryfall that doesn't have an amazing border color, you can go ahead and still select it and it will fill in this as a pure black. So, from here, what I would do is go through and basically choose all the arts I want for all of my cards. Uh, you can click get all prints if you don't see an art that you want and if there are more. A lot of the times for things like Soul Ring or Arcane Signant, you're going to see these arts. But if you want to get something like extended borders, uh, but with the same art, different frames, you you're going to want to click that get all prints button at the bottom. All right, something to mention. So, what I usually do with my double-sided cards is I will take them and drag them all the way down to the bottom. This will be for something that I'll show you in just a little bit, uh, because we're going to want to do both

5:19 sides of the card, obviously. And you can see that this has two sides. Another cool feature I forgot to mention is you can actually replace cards as well. So if you click on a card, there's a text box at the top. You can use this to type in any card you want. So like if I type in soul ring, click enter, it will go ahead and it will replace the card that you had selected there. This is especially useful for like if you mess up a print. So like if I type in saj ring, obviously it's not going to find the card, but it'll show up here at the bottom of the list. You can click it and you can replace it with whatever actual card that you meant to get. Okay. Okay, so I've got all of my card art selected uh with the arts that I wanted. I'm going to click export to PDF. Again, this might take a minute, but just give it just give it some time because it's making sure that it's getting the direct images for the highest quality print. Once it exports, it'll usually pop up into another window

6:05 in your browser, but usually I'll just go to my files and find the uh find the file directly. So, once you have your file selected, basically you're going to open it up in whatever PDF editor you have or viewer um and you're just going to print it. So, I'll go file, print. Okay, so super important to know. There are a few things here. I'm using an Epson printer. Um, regardless of what printer you're using, you should always download the drivers to the actual printer. Uh, this will increase the quality of your prints tfold sometimes and give you a lot more control of the quality of your prints. With Epson printer drivers, you'll get this printer options drop down here, and you can change things in print settings. So here I have my media set to premium presentation paper mat. That's what I'm using. Uh even if I wasn't using the

6:52 Epson brand paper or whatever, I would still choose this option. For color selection, I have Adobe RGB. And for print quality, I have it set to high quality. In advanced color options, I have saturation cranked 10. This is because I'm using a matte finish, and a lot of the times saturation will get drowned a little bit. So I like to print them a little bit of juiced up saturation. For this example, I'm just going to go ahead and print one page uh since I don't want to do all of them. But I will print a page that has a double-sided card. So I can show you how I would set that up and click print. Okay. With my printer, I use the rear feeder. Uh while this is going, I can kind of show you some of the paper options you have and finish options you have. So my go-to paper is this premium presentation paper mat. It's a little thinner than an actual card, but that's super nice because we're going to be laminating it with 3M laminate anyway.

7:39 For laminate, I'll be using the Scotch thermal laminating pouches. Those are 3M as well. In the past, I've also used this uh La Lama matte finish, but you can also use glossy finish. And those will also look really cool. And I can show you some examples of how those will look as well. So, if you do end up going with a glossy finish, you're going to get these super rich, deep blacks and vibrant colors, but you will notice that they have a much more plasticky feel than the matte finish cards. So, these are some examples of glossy cards, and that's with a glossy laminate, still a matte paper. And here's an example of some matte finish cards in comparison. So, while that's printing, I'm also going to go over here and turn on my laminator. This is a Fellow's ION 95 laminator. Nothing fancy. I think it was like 50 bucks at Staples. Okay, so it finished printing. I'll take a look at it. Pull it out.

8:25 You can see it looks super beautiful. Uh you do not need an Epson printer for this. Uh especially one this fancy. You can do this with any inkjet printer. If you check out Cry Cryroxy, he's got a ton of videos on budget printers that you can use and different options. But as long as it's an inkjet printer, you should be able to get a pretty good result with good paper. Okay, so now I'm going to actually print the back of these. Um, I like to do a custom back that I have. And I also want to make sure that I get these double face cards set up accordingly. So I'm going to give it some time to dry. But while that's happening, I'm going to go over here to my computer again and set up the other side of the prints. Okay, so I'm back at proxied. I'm going to go ahead down here at the bottom left and click add cardbacks. This just adds my custom cardbacks that I use on most all my prints. You can upload your own from NPC. They have a ton of different cardback options. You can come over

9:11 here, browse, and download whatever ones you want and upload those as a custom image if you'd like. As mentioned though, we are also doing some double-sided cards. So, I'm going to come over here to this left panel and I'm going to go ahead and type in the name of the cards that I was trying to get the backside for. All right, so that was a cursed witch and curse of lees. So, I'll go ahead and click fetch cards. You can see that was much faster since it was only two cards. And they'll have down here at the bottom. So, I'm going to go ahead and delete two of these backs. And now we need to make sure we get our alignment set up right. So, here's our print. Right. When we feed this through the printer, we're going to have to flip it over. And it actually goes in upside down and backwards. Since my printer prints with the images coming out on the bottom, what that means is here on our website, we want to make

9:57 sure that we mirror our our card backs. So, this is actually going to go in the bottom left instead of the bottom right. The cursive witch, lucky for us, is directly in the center, so we can just leave that there. If you have a bunch of cards that you need to do two-sided, you can just go ahead and drop those in the middle slots and it'll make it much easier when you're having to figure this out in your head later on. But test it out with your printer. Uh, use some cheap paper and figure out how it works for you. But basically, I'm going to take this exact sheet. I'm going to flip it over and drop it in the back of my printer and I'm going to print this out. All right. So, before printing, we do want to make sure we switch over to the back side of the art. So, I'm going go ahead and click on a cursive witch. You should see all the backside options on here as well. Um, I can go ahead and check the get all prints, see if there's any prints you

10:42 like more. But for this, I'm just going to go ahead and use this one since this is the opposite of the one we printed initially. And then for curse of leeches, you can see we have a leeching marker as the back side of the card. I will click on this. And now we are good to go ahead and print. So I've loaded my paper in upside down and backwards. You'll see it fold down into the printer. Like I said, your printer might be different. You might have a printer paper drawer. Test it out with some cheap paper. Um, you can even do black and white prints if you want, just just to try and figure out what your printer's alignment is like. So, for those of you wondering what my exact printer is, it is an EcoTank 8550. This printer is a beast. Um, and definitely more than you would need for this. I have one because my wife is an artist and she does a lot of printing yourself. So, it is just a nice thing to have for my fun little hobby on the side as well. But, as mentioned before, you can just

11:28 use any inkjet printer. Um, I think Cry Cry has brought up printers that are as cheap as $50 that you can use to do a process very similar to this. All right, so it's finished printing. You will see our card backs here and the card faces here lined up. So, what I'm actually going to do is I'm going to let this sit here and dry uh probably for about 10 to 15 minutes honestly. Uh for small projects like this or for larger projects rather, they end up drying anyway because you have to print, you know, 11 to 12 sheets depending on how many cards you have. But I'm going to go ahead and let this dry and come back to you guys in a minute here. So, I'd like to The reason I let these dry is a lot of the times they'll come out and they'll be a little bit warped. You'll see like a little bit of a bend in the paper and that'll resolve a little bit over time, especially if you put like a little bit of weight on it. So,

12:14 sometimes I'll just go ahead and set it up like this and put card box on the back or something, something light enough to just flatten it out while it dries. If I'm doing a bigger print, I don't really want to do the whole process in a day. Sometimes I'll actually let them dry overnight just before laminating. I find that it helps with the deeper colors and they will continue to dry after laminated, just much slower. Okay, so it's been about 10 minutes or so. I'm going to go ahead and start laminating. I do have my laminator preheated, so using these Scotch thermal laminating pouches. These are actually pretty handy. They sell them at Walmart, so it's easy to get in a pinch. You don't necessarily have to wait forever for them to show up, but there are other options. And sometimes if you plan ahead enough, you can have plenty for a large project. Okay, so I'm over here at my laminator. Um, you want to be careful with these. Make sure that there's no dust on them.

13:01 I know a lot of people dust them off with like a little blower before putting them into the laminating sheets and that can prevent because if you get hair or anything underneath it, it will be there forever. So, keep that in mind. I'm going to be a little bit reckless this time and not do it. But, you know, usually you want to make sure that they're super super pristine before doing this. Okay. So, to actually use these laminating pouches, what you're going to do is you're going to open them up. You're going to take your paper, slide it in. I'll try and line it as good as I can here. So, I push it to the back. Drop the top. Should look something like this. And we're going to go ahead and just stick it in our eliminator. So, I'll go ahead and feed it in. You want to make sure that you've got the closed end first. So, like these are sealed on one end and open on the other. All right. Once it starts coming out on the other end here, I'll usually guide it by

13:46 pushing down just slightly. Um, help straighten it out because it does like to bend upward. Um, especially if your laminator isn't preheated enough. If you find that it's like a little bit bendy or, you know, not necessarily a great laminate, you can run it through the laminator again. Sometimes I'll run them through, you know, two or even three times just to make sure that it's really sealed. And it should look something like this when it's done. You see our backs, our fronts lining up. All right. So, our next step is going to be going over to our Fiskers rotary cutter or rotary trimmer. Um, you can use any rotary trimmer you'd like. Uh, this is just the one that I found at my local Michaels. Uh, you can buy them on Amazon pretty much anywhere. But this is what we're going to use to cut our cards. So, to do that, you're actually

14:31 going to load in your paper like this. Set down the top. Line it up with your guide. This is where it's going to take some practice. Um, you're going to want to line it up directly on the guide. You're going to do this on both the left and the right side. And you're going to slide across the top. Once you got it set, you see in a lot of my videos, it will seem much quicker than the actual process is, but it takes a lot of practice. And we're going to go ahead and we're going to do that all the way around. All right. Once you've taken off the outside, you're going to start taking off the actual cards. So, I did use a bleed edge here. So, I'm going to have to do some additional cuts. You'll see that we have guides. Um, there's going

15:19 to be two here. There's one here and one here. So, we will have a thin strip between each of our cards, which will just be discarded. Okay. Now, we're going to do the individual cards. You can see they will also have guides here and here and here and here. Okay, so I'm going to do the rest of the cards, but I just wanted to show off real quick. Look at how beautiful the alignment is on the front and back of these cards.

16:11 So, at this point, I'm going to preheat the laminator again and get it set up to start rounding the corners here. So, I get a lot of questions about this. This is just the Kabumaru Pro. Um, this is on Amazon. It's like $15, I think. Might be less. Might be like 10 bucks. But, basically, this is for rounding corners. You can use the small setting on it. It will be slightly rounder than a Magic the Gathering card. Um, if anybody knows of one that's 2 millimeters, let me know. This one does 3 millimeters, and that's as close as I've been able to get, but it'll still bring our cards to life, as you'll see. So, to do it, basically, you're just going to take your card, stick the corner in here, and click it. I always click it twice because sometimes you'll see little hanging pieces. And this will make sure you get a nice clean round edge.

16:57 And look at that. We've got ourselves a legit looking card. So, I'll go through the rest of these and uh do the same thing. There you have it. Okay, so I'm going to go back over to my laminator with these cards now. Okay, this is a super important point. After you've gone through and you've cut all of your cards, you're going to want to take them and run them through the laminator again. This will just seal the edges off. Um, it's not as necessary with a glossy laminate, but with the matte laminates, you'll find that they bubble and peel if you don't do this step. So, it's very important.

17:45 And that is it. I hope you guys enjoyed it. If you did, be sure to drop a like and a comment. Uh, definitely check out proxy.com. If you have any feedback on the site or any features that you would like to have added, please let me know. Um, it's continued work in progress. Shout out to Cry Cry Proxy. He's helped out a ton with this process and helped me refine my skills. So check out his channel on YouTube. He's also here on Tik Tok. So that is all for now.