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Playtesting & Printing

A custom card isn't finished when the art lands — it's finished when it survives a real game. These guides cover playtesting your designs, printing clean proxies at home, and running community design challenges that sharpen your whole playgroup.

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6 min read

How to Design a Custom MTG Set

How to design a custom MTG set — scoping, the set skeleton, color balance, rarity, the ten draft archetypes, and playtesting your Limited environment.

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8 min read

How to Design a Custom MTG Cube

How to design a custom MTG cube — cube size, power level, the ten color archetypes, singleton tradeoffs, and the draft-test-iterate loop that tunes it.

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8 min read

How to Playtest Custom MTG Cards

How to playtest custom Magic cards: goldfish solo, play real games with proxies, read your playgroup, iterate one change at a time, and test a whole set.

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13 min read

How to Print Proxy MTG Cards at Home

Print MTG proxies the right way: a PDF or print sheets at 100% scale, a bleed for print shops, files sized for MakePlayingCards, cut to 2.5 × 3.5 in.

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5 min read

Designing Balanced Custom MTG Cards

A practical framework for costing custom Magic cards — rate baselines, the color pie, downside design, rarity as a balance tool, and the playtest questions that catch broken designs before your playgroup does.

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4 min read

How to Run a Community Card-Design Challenge

A playbook for design challenges that people actually enter — writing briefs with creative tension, sizing the window, picking tags, judging by community vote, and keeping a weekly rhythm alive.

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