After You Print
Congratulations, you've designed a deck and you're ready to make actual cards! There are a number of ways to turn your printable deck into a real, printed one. This section discusses our own favorite method.Characteristics of a Good Deck
A "real" card deck is easy to shuffle, easy to hold in the hand, and the cards are opaque.
Shuffling
Several factors contribute
to ease of shuffling.
The cards need to be fairly (but not completely) stiff.
They need to be exactly the same size,
which is very difficult to accomplish
if you cut them out by hand.
And they need to have a certain amount
of slickness.
If they're too slick they'll be hard to hold,
but if they're too rough you won't
be able to slide them together
when you shuffle
or square the deck.
Holding in the Hand
For the same reasons as shuffling,
the cards need to have the right amount of slickness.
Too little and it's hard to spread the cards
in your hand;
too much
and your players will be dropping
their slippery cards all over the floor.
Opacity
Opacity is important
because it must not be possible
to see the fronts from the back
when the light is shining through them.
Professionally-made cards are layered
and have a "black core" to block all light.
Regular printable paper,
including thick "card stock",
is not opaque.
Card Sleeves to the Rescue!
Fortunately there's an easy solution to all of these problems: card sleeves!A box of 100 card sleeves typically costs no more than a couple of dollars, even for high-quality sleeves. Most have one opaque side, and you can choose from a variety of colors if you need to distinguish different decks by their backs.
Sleeving your cards solves both the opacity problem and the sizing problem very nicely.
Stiffness can be solved in a number of ways. We like to print on index card stock, and use high-quality sleeves that add a bit of stiffness of their own. The resulting cards are floppier than real cards, but can still be easily shuffled.
You may prefer to print on thin paper, and stuff each sleeve with a cheap "real" card behind your printed card, to provide that extra stiffness. ("Land cards" from Magic: The Gathering are readily available.)
Slickness can still be an issue. Some cheap brands can be a bit sticky, and we have seen sleeves that are incredibly slick and very difficult to handle. But most brands of card sleeves are not a problem.
Double-Sided Cards
Most decks just have artwork on the back, to make them pretty. But occasionally you'll need cards to be two-sided, with information on both sides that the players need to see.Sleeves still work for this: you can get "clear" sleeves that are transparent. See Double-Sided Printing for discussion on how to create two-sided cards.
Rounded Corners
Real cards have rounded corners. The reason is simple: square-cut corners are easily bent.You can buy corner-cutting gadgets that do a good job of rounding corners, but we recommend against it. It's a lot of work to carefully clip the corners of a large deck, and if you sleeve your cards, there's no need for it.