I’ve just finished printing custom playing cards for our upcoming Mordheim campaign using card sheets purchased from PlainCards. Compared to purchasing blank business cards or name badge cards from the local office supply store, this approach has a lot to recommend it. The one challenge is getting the cards out of their sheets without damage, but with a little practice that isn’t hard. Pictured below are two finished decks: Lizardmen and Bretonnian.

The total cost from plaincards was 70$. This was for 60 card sheets with six cards per sheet (36$), registration for their quickcards2 program used to setup the images and text to print on the cards (15$), a can of spray gloss coating ($7.50), and shipping ($10.83). That seemed high to me, but when I went to the local Staples to price using business cares or name badge inserts for the same purpose, I would have had to spend around 45$ for the same quantity of cards using either one of those options. That would have left me without the gloss sealant (8$ approximate value) and also the cards would not have been the size I wanted. I wanted something exactly game card sized. Business cards and name badge inserts were both a bit too small.

While I was waiting for the card sheets to arrive in the mail, I went ahead and used their quickcards program to prepare. Quickcards is downloadable for free from their website, but you have to pay 15$ to register it and be able to print.

The program itself is very simple, showing one sheet at a time on the screen and giving you two choices for editing the contents of a card side: image or text. The image editing tab allows you to choose a single image and also add a text title. Their are controls to change the size of the image, shift it around on the card, and add a border. The text title can either be above or below the image. The text editing tab allows you to enter text in any font available on your computer and choose color, size, bolding, etc. It is important to note that you cannot mix these two editing options on a card side, you must choose one or the other. So if you really need your card to have text flowing around various small images, quickcards won’t support that. Fortunately for me, I didn’t need to do that. I simply wanted a single image and title on the backs of the cards, and text describing the cards’ effects on the fronts.

Once the package arrived from PlainCards, I set about printing my decks. I had seven decks of twenty-four cards each to print – four sheets of six cards per deck. I have a Konika Minolta color laser printer, and for the most part it had no difficulty printing from quickcards. I did find that I needed my paper tray to be more than half full for it to be able to pick up the fairly slick card sheets, and every so often I would get a media jam where it was unable to initially pick up a sheet from the tray. The cards printed excellently – very crisp and with images/text aligned perfectly with the cards. I did have three out of the twenty-eight sheets printed that were not lined up quite right, clipping the text slightly at the edge of the cards. I’m not sure what caused this, but the clipping was so slight that I didn’t bother to reprint the three sheets. To print the sheets front and back you simply take the sheets after printing, flip them over, put them back in your printer tray, open the quickcards file for the opposite side, and print again. Below are pictures of the printed sheets.

The next step was to trot the sheets down to the basement and spray them with PlainCards’ clear gloss sealant spray. This is a stinky spray, and you want to do this in a well ventilated area. Spraying the card sheets was very easy, and I had luckily just enough to go around. The one can emptied out completely when I sprayed the last of my sheets. So one can of their spray is good for about 28 sheets, front and back. You will want something clean to set the sheets out on to dry. In the sun and with a light breeze, it only took two or three minutes for a sprayed sheet to be dry enough to handle along the edges. I would not stack them, though, until they have set out to dry for at least ten or fifteen minutes. So you will need a large clean surface area to lay out your sprayed sheets. Once one side has dried reasonably, you can flip it and spray the other. Dust and insects will stick to this coating while wet, so spray in an area where you can keep both well out of your way.

I do like the gloss coating. It adds a nice finished effect to the cards. I don’t know that it protects them particularly – I still think large amounts of shuffling will wear out the card edges, sprayed or unsprayed.

After letting the cards dry in the sun for a couple of hours, they felt very dry to me, and ready to separate from their sheets. This proved to be by far the most difficult task. My first attempt involved attempting to push them out with my thumbs, like you would cardboard game components. BZZZZ! Wrong answer. After damaging a couple of cards, I then tried sticking my thumbnail into a corner of a card (the corners give way the easiest), and then sliding my thumbnail along the perforations of the card.

This worked, but it took me about five minutes to free six cards on a sheet, and I still damaged cards. Below is a shot of my most heavily damaged card from this sheet.

After some cursing, my next attempt was the “bendy method”. Bend the entire sheet at the edges of the perforations, using a metal ruler to help keep the bend straight. Flip the sheet over, and bend the other way. Bending around the interior two cards on a sheet was a little tricky, but overall this method worked much better. I was soon able to free the six cards on a single sheet in about three minutes, with virtually no damage along the card edges. Below I’m bending an interior edge using a metal ruler.

Using the bendy method, once the cards were freed you can see below very little damage was incurred!

Once I had a full deck of twenty-four cards freed, I stacked them up and cleaned the edges. PlainCards provides a nice little sandpapery thingie with your order to accomplish this task. For the cards that I had punched / thumbnailed out, considerable cleaning was needed:

That looks pretty ugly, but their tool does a very good job:

The cards removed via the bendy method still needed edge cleaning, but not much. You could probably use them without sanding at all.

That’s it! Overall I think I ended up with something much more satisfactory than I would have using name badge or business cards sheets from an office supply store, but at a slightly higher cost.