How to Make Cards (3 Ways)

today we're going to talk about making cards I use three different techniques to make cards depending on the project sometimes I use card sleeves sometimes I just print on cardstock and sometimes I put labels on playing cards these techniques are all pretty easy so we're going to cover them all in this video this is a method that I use for play test decks a lot this is just to print the cards on plain paper and then put them into trading card game sleeves along with a stiffener which is just a card for this project you need plain white paper card sleeves and some sort of junk cards to use as stiffeners in those sleeves card sleeves come from your favorite local game shop or you can order them online and while you're at it you should get some junk trading card game cards like these the appropriate price to pay for extra cards like this is free do not pay any more than that I've got these particular cards in the trash at the modern masters Grand Prix in Las Vegas okay first you just want to print your card files on plain white paper and then you want to cut them out and this cut it doesn't have to be very precise because they're all going to go in these sleeves and that's what gives them their uniform size inside every card sleeve you want to put your trash card as a stiffener and the game card in together and that will make the card sturdy and easier to shuffle you can do this without the stiffeners too but they wind up being a little more flimsy and harder to deal with it's hard to shuffle sleeve cards because they're so thick and slippery this is only fifty cards and you can see how thick it is you also don't want to shuffle them end to end because that Sleeps will wind up going into each other so you want to do it sideways like this or you can sort of just do it in your hand plow them into each other like this the card sleeves method is pretty easy and it's pretty cheap you don't need a special cutter for it and the reason I say it's cheap is that the cards and the sleeves are reusable so all you're really blowing through is the white paper that you printed it on method two is just to print the cards on cardstock like this this is a little more labor-intensive as you'll see but it's a it's good for some applications especially if you want to duplicate the look and feel of the old fashioned cheap-ass games which were made exactly like this for this you just need a good cardstock like 110 pound index and a good paper cutter optionally you can also use a corner rounder this method works best for black and white cards which I can do on a laser printer partially because I'm printing right on the surface and and this is going to get a lot of where inkjet will will get wet and rub off and laser toner will stay a little better so start by printing the cards on the card stock and print a guide sheet as well it's going to help you do the cutting if the card file doesn't have a guide sheet or if you can't just make one then print an extra copy of page one and use that to layout your cuts take your guide sheet and extend those crop lines all the way to the edge of the page we are not going to trim around the outside first we're going to make two bust cuts down the middle of this page we're going to separate into four sections and then we're going to clean up the edges the reason you do that is you cut the sheet you're going to have some creep and you want to minimize that by starting a good clean cut right in the middle use the cutters backstop on this so you can make the same bust cut on every sheet after you've done one direction you're going to cut the other direction you're going to wind up with four quadrants of this page each with two rough edges because you shuffle these cards end to end the height is more important than the width so the width is the first cut you're going to make and you're going to save the height cut for the very last cut use your guide sheet to set a depth for the width cut and then you lock that setting in for the entire deck you can all the cards rough edges off until you just have strips of one or two cards with just one rough edge left then you use the same method to mark the height of these cards and trim them all down in this step you do not care about hitting the crop lines perfectly you are probably going to miss them it's more important that all the cards be the same height that's why cards have margins now this is an optional step but your cards will all be shuffle a little better if you round the corners get a corner rounding tool like this you can get it from a scrapbooking store and painstakingly clip every corner these cards can be a lot of work but they're worth the effort they're nice and thin portable shuffle hull and fairly cheap method three is to stick labels on playing cards I use playing cards specifically for this and cards that have a linen finish because that linen finish keeps them from sticking together and makes them easier to shop for this you're going to need full sheet labels some junk playing cards and your paper cutter use full sheet labels for this knot die-cut labels there aren't any labels that are cut to exactly the right size for playing cards and even if there were you would have real trouble lining them up you print on a full sheet of labels and then you can chop them up exactly where you need to for this technique print your card art of 95% you want it to be a little smaller than what you're sticking into you can just eyeball your cutting on this the cuts don't have to be precise they just have to be small enough to fit on the card now stick your labels to the cards I don't typically label the backs of these cards because that screws up to finish and makes them harder to shuffle it makes the deck really thick I only sticker the backs if it's for show so if I was making a video and I wanted to pretend this was a real copy of the game I'd sticker in the backs otherwise they're much better just using the original cards and that's method 3 there's lots of other techniques for making cards you can hybridize these techniques or come up with your own you should also check out my other video on how to make tile cards for when you're making a game that you actually build the board out of the tiles now pick your favorite and go make some cards cheap-ass games come in three varieties deluxe classic and free our deluxe games are lavishly produced with high quality components our classic games are cheap they're in simple packaging and they don't have all the spare parts our free games are free you print them yourself you decide if you like them and if you do you can send us a donation and you will check out our catalog at cheap ask.com

Channel: James Ernest

Views: 701,682

Keywords: James Ernest, How To, Cards, Cheapass Games, Playing Card (Fictional Object), Board Games, Card Games

Id: l0t6PBypahI

Length: 5min 54sec (354 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 06 2014