Guides

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.

Open the card creator

June 23, 20266 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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June 23, 20268 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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June 14, 20268 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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June 13, 20267 min read

How to Print Proxy MTG Cards at Home

Print MTG proxies at home the right way: design a card, export a print-ready PDF, print at 100% scale, and cut to a true 2.5 × 3.5 inch size.

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June 10, 20265 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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June 8, 20264 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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