How to make free, high quality, MTG proxies!

[Music] welcome back everybody this is Edwin the magic engineer and I know I've been offline for a little bit sorry to you guys about that my absolute top priorities are family and job and just those two things have just been in in a great place there's been a lot of cool family friend things going on and there's been a lot of work going on a lot of extra hours so apologies for everybody that I've been offline uh that's I'm not quitting anything I've just just been busy it's just a little season from something and getting back to it so this video is all about printing proxies and this is a topic that I'm really I'm really excited about this topic because I'm a huge evangelist for Magic the Gathering players having access to the cards that they want to play to actually just be able to play with people and you know the reason that's in a big debate is you know for anyone who's new to this kind of topic some of these cards are just crazy expensive I mean by crazy expensive like I actually attend tournaments where my opponent across from me literally might be playing like a fifty to a hundred thousand dollar deck I mean it's it's insane right for these old-school and vintage tournaments and stuff like that it can be absolutely insane and a lot of people just can't hang with that even on the lower end of the scale like the newer formats you know you'll still run into people to have two three hundred dollar decks and if you're just trying to get in and learn how to play there's a big barrier there so I made another video a while ago when I first started my channel like all about proxies and I talked about them at length but I never said how to actually create them so I'm gonna first show you guys a bunch of information about how to actually create proxies and then at the end of the video I'm gonna revisit some of the topics about like why I think this is a good thing and why I don't think this is actually a bad thing for Wizards of the coast and what I would consider to move away from the realm of proxies into a realm of what we would call counterfeits and you know how to avoid that because we don't want to do counterfeits right we don't want to steal any money or intellectual property that's not the idea here right so anyways about the creation of proxies there's a couple major websites that are good to know about let me flip you guys over to my secondary display the two main websites that I use for actually gathering the images one of them is now referred to as scry fall it used to be magic cards info and then the other one is Wizards of the coast own page just called together so here's some notes that I've actually got on the topic and all I was trying to show you guys is that magic cards info is now scry fall and so it's this page in this page that we're actually going to use and then the imaging software that I use to actually create the proxies is just Microsoft Paint because that comes in all all windows and the images that I'm actually going to pull off of this site off of scry fall they all have this default resolution and then you'll see how I get to the print sheet size so let's actually just get to that first so this is the scry full site and let's say what I'm wanting to do is I'm wanting to actually just get my images and collect them right so what's the first thing that everyone's going to look for everyone's gonna look for like Black Lotus right it's gonna be the first thing anyone's going to want to look for so there's the blacker Lotus and the Black Lotus both showed up here so if I click on the Black Lotus you'll notice that this doesn't look like too traditional one and over here on the side I can actually see the all the different versions that exist so in this case let's say I want beta and now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to right click and say copy image then I'm gonna come right down here to the Start menu and I'm going to say mspaint and I'm going to load up Microsoft Paint there it is took a second to come up sorry about that okay so now now that I've got paint open I it's it's Guardi got too big of a template open I need to make it smaller so what I'm gonna do is hit ctrl e here and I'm going to shrink the size down to nine and nine and then hit OK and now see it's just this tiny little size here only nine pixels by nine pixels then want to hit paste what actually comes in is the image that came from that website but now we're looking at just the raw image right now one reason I like to do this site the skyfall one is to see how nice and clear the letters are this would never work for an actual counterfeit card because you cannot see the print patterns it's not good enough to make a counterfeit out of but it is good enough to actually see nice clarity on the lettering and such you can actually read the card if I'm going to open up another instance of paint here and then I'm going to go grab an image off of gatherer so let's grab the Black Lotus here off of gather then I go to the beta version so I'm looking at the biggest image that they've got and if I copy this image cancel and I go paste this one let's do the same trick ctrl e then go nine pixels by nine pixels to make it small then I paste now what you've got here is I had just zoomed in see how bad quality all of the text there is if I make this one maybe similar size or close to similar size and we look at these two side-by-side now you can clearly see the the left here is what I actually got from the official Wizard site the gatherer and on the right is what I actually got from Skyfall it's obviously Skyfall is a lot more clear now again I'm not making counterfeits but I want to actually be able to read what my proxy actually is so I don't want to use the images that I'm getting off of gather or given the choice I want to use the one I got off of ask rifle which means I'm starting with this image but now this one looks too much like the original Lotus and I don't want that right so then what well you're gonna want to do is you're gonna want to just to make sure you're being clear and legit with everybody you're gonna want to write proxy let's make this the right size and put it somewhere like right on the card so when you print out a version of this it's very clear to everybody you're not you're not attempting or making any claim that this is a real card it is just a proxy but see that that wording is invariant that lettering isn't very fun what I've actually got here is when I've been making my own proxies I've got images here and let's see not in that folder it's in this folder I made this image here and this one is nice because it might be hard to tell on the camera but it's actually got black letters surrounded with yellow I actually went in with paint and I colored it if I change the color of the background here it's easy to see if I did something like that you can see that it's got black surrounded by yellow lettering and I wanted that specifically because when I grab that and I paste it in it looked just looks a little bit cooler right so I'm gonna grab this image ctrl C then I'm gonna come back over to this Lotus image and let's say I'm going to want to paste it into the center of the card here right like right maybe right about there so if I put it in now I don't want that border there so if I come over to the main menu I need to go fuller just have more options and I click on the select and then transparent what that does is any color that's here in color 2 becomes the transparent color and right now that one is white and so all that white section went away and all I've got here is just what's not white and so now I can just paste that in and when i zoom out you've got a little bit better looking word of proxy there right and so with this little simple step well you've basically got at this point is you've got you've got yourself go back there you've now got a proxy that just says proxy right in the middle the image quality is pretty good but you're not quite done yet right because what you want to do is you want to print them into a sheet like and the size really matters but if you're just gonna print them into a sheet you know maybe something like this I don't know if I can get good lighting on it so this is a print sheet that I made and it's from those images that are all from scribe fall and it's all just white back it's on normal just paper and if I you look really close you'll see like I wrote proxy on all of those actual images right you can see the proxy like right there in the middle for like the Lotus and like all those others now I did that intentionally because again I don't want to make counterfeits but the size of the card is really important right if it's too big then when you try to like you know put that in with your other cards it's not going to fit in your sleeve if it's too small then it's just gonna look all weird you gotta get the size right but you really don't want to waste a lot of ink right and so what you're gonna want to do is do this you're gonna want to make like a grid pattern and then you got to get it to about the right size now let me show you guys what I actually did for that so we're going back to the paint image here right now I'm just gonna focus on just this one now if I hit control e I can see that this is 672 pixels wide and it's 932 pixels not sorry 936 pixels tall right so I know those dimensions I'm gonna write it down on a little sheet of paper here now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to hit ctrl a delete whole image is gone right I don't want that image to actually be there and now I'm going to take the tool here and I'm going to pick the black color and I'm gonna pick the paint can and I'm gonna paint the whole thing black right now I'm going to open up another instance of paint and so now I've got a new instance of paint here and I'm going to make this one control e again to bring up that size and what I want is I want to make this one only two pixels smaller on each rection right this one was 672 wide right so what we want to do on this other one now well I can close this so what I want to do on this one is it used to be 672 but I want to make it 2 pixels smaller so I'm gonna say 670 and then for the height this was 936 and so I instead have 936 I'm gonna go 2 pixels smaller and say 934 okay so now we have another image it's white and it's almost the same size as this one but it's slightly smaller so I'll grab the Select tool now I hit ctrl a to grab the whole thing ctrl C to copy now I go back over to this side control V and I'll turn off transparent and now what you've got is you've got that white ones pasted inside here but remember how it was 2 pixels smaller that's so when I line this up perfectly here just give me a sec right there so now what I've got when i zoom in is you can see there's a black border around the entire thing you can see over here on the right side of the screen and it's only one pixel wide right now that's important because I now have a nice thin border around this entire thing now if I go back to the Select tool and maybe I maybe I'll even save this as a little temporary thinks I'm showing you guys how to do this stuff empty G images and I'll make a new temp folder here helping people inside of there and let's give this one a nice easy to remember name so it's clear what I was doing card frame let's just say we're doing card frame so now we want to make a grid pattern of it right now this this image here is 672 pixels wide so I'm going to do control a control V now I'm going to open up a calculator and let's make this image a little smaller so I can see them both now this one control key again to bring up this window it's six hundred seventy-two pixels wide so what we want to do over here say six seventy two times three twenty sixteen and so this new one we've just opened up I want it to be 2016 wide and this one the original was 936 tall so now we come back over to our nifty gifty calculator we say clear then we want nine 36 times 3 so it's 2808 tall so we've done three times the width three times the height and that's what this new template over here is on the right so now this one that I called card frame if I say control a selects it control C I copy it now I come to this one and I control V and I paste you can see right where that border was in fact if i zoom out you can see it looks like it's about the right size for a card in the top third and top left third section so now if I'm gonna V control V again I'm gonna paste in more of these frames right but we don't want to just throw them anywhere we want to line them up really good so let me back those up control Z to back up and I'll scroll over a bit and I ctrl V to paste now I can just line this guy up and notice that I don't want to overlap them I want them to just line up so all the pixels are represented now I'll come to this guy paste him in OOP that's it there we go so that whole top section is all done there's three cards across that top section now actually want to repeat it down and actually know what I could have done this slightly differently let's go back to what that original number was ctrl e what was it was 936 so I'm gonna come over here and I'm gonna turn this one back into 936 and I've just got this top section here now I'm going to say control a copy now I'm going to go back to the size that I want to be full-size 2808 and now if I hit paste what I've got is a whole nother section of all three of those right and so I want to zoom in real good and make sure I've got these so I'm holding the control key and then rolling the mouse wheel to zoom in by the way ctrl V to paste and let's line up that corner there right there now scroll down and do it one more time just like that there we go now if i zoom out what I've got is a card frame that literally has nine cards on it right and that's pretty good we don't need this one anymore we now have a better one over here we're gonna call it print frame so now this is a good print frame right and now once we've got a print frame all saved here what we want to do is start pasting cards into it right so if we come over to the skyfall website and we right-click and we say copy image then we come back over here zoom in a bit and then we paste you can see that that Lotus just popped in right there just all nice and perfect right you can even do several of them and if you line up all those corners you can do you can print yourself a whole nice nice sheet of black lotuses right let's like zoom in real good there to make sure we really get it nice and clean paste and you can see the line up there there and there there see how that black line that went away Boop like that and so now you've got a bunch of lotuses in there and you can print this sheet out but hey we still have a problem right because we didn't know if these the sheet of lotuses is going to like be the right size or the wrong size we also don't have our little proxy symbol in there either so I didn't don't want that there's a couple problems to solve here so I hit ctrl Z and I backed out well what we need to do and this is one of the reasons I did it in this way where you can see this grid like this what you actually want to do is you want to start attempting to print this because you want to make sure that you've got your scaling right and let me flip back over to the other camera so I can show you kind of bit more what I'm talking about and in fact I'm actually going to use this camera so I'll bring the scale back in in just a second so now the first one that I was attempting to do I printed out this sheet and when I printed it I printed it at 33% and you can see I marked it right there and I wrote out the resolution on it now when you print it let me grab some of the cards that are printed you know these are some of the ones that I printed just a little bit ago and I've got proxy written in the middle there but there's a problem that you'll have if you're not paying close enough attention if I grab a real magic card I put it on here and if I hold it right over the top if you look at these bottom corners here and here that's square it's or the rectangular should say it's too small it's gonna be really small inside the sleeve and if I hold it like this and I look at this line in this line this one is oh it's too small this way so dimensionally or I shouldn't say aspect ratio from length to width it's correct but its overall too small now when I printed this one I printed it and I wrote down the percentage I wrote it it was 33% and I printed it like with just these black lines because I'm barely gonna use any actual ink when I'm doing this so you know you're gonna save yourself a lot of printer and whoever's paying for that ink you're gonna make them much happier right the next one that I've printed I took just an educated guess based on the size and it seemed to me and how close it was and I guessed 35% and I pull that over to this screen so when I did the 35% ratio as you can see that one is much closer to the actual lines on each side and it's much closer to the lines on the top and the actual bottom either so with my printer printing at 35% is actually pretty darn good now something to notice about that is my printer is a Canon Pixma MX 880 and the reason that's important is because the maximum dpi for mine is 9600 by 2400 that's something that is very important if you're trying to actually get the right size get the right scaling see where was it was it this one and then I go here now you can see this is just a website talking about my actual printer and you can see my resolution called out right here now it doesn't matter that you're that same resolution what the reason why that's important is for my printer if that is my resolution right and then the size of the individual picture that I was printing was a very certain size you could see the pixels on it the ratio between the pixels and what I'm actually getting from my printer means that I'm gonna scale mine at 35% to get them right so you're just gonna have to play with that a little bit to figure that out which is why you want to do this grid pattern first so you're not wasting a lot of ink as you figure it out so now on mine I've actually got it now figured out so I've know what the actual size was and so this is the size of my pattern is going to be when mine is set at 35% and let me just show you that actually let me turn that background so if I was going to go back over to paint and if I was going to hit print and I go to page setup then if I click portrait and adjust to and then over here say 35% then if I was to print this one it would look just about right right but right now I just did page setup so let's now do print preview and you can see there was a problem the lion didn't appear here on the bottom now that's because the scaling of my printing is right but it just the printer didn't allow enough space on the bottom so if I now adjust this bottom profile and let's say I go to like point two or something like that now you can see that bottom line pop in so there's gonna be enough space if I print this and then it looks right okay well now I'm ready to go right so now I need to go to the next step and the next step what's that going to be well I've already made some of them here in these images I made what's called print sheets first I'll show you that I took all these images and I downloaded a whole bunch of images of a bunch of important cards from the skyfall website if i zoom here you can see the individual cards that I downloaded and again that was all from this rifled website from this guy right in all that I did is I right clicked and I said copy image right and after I copy image and I would just paste it into a different version of paint let's see I'll open that up so let's get that copy paint okay so there's the image and then once you've got that you then you just save the file and then after you save the file then you the next thing I want to do is notice how none of these pictures none of these actually said proxy in the middle right and I didn't want to print ones that did not say proxy so then what I did is I saved all those and I made another folder I called proxies and then I literally went into each one of these and I put proxy right in the middle of the card for all these cards they all say proxy right in the middle right that's what I have in that folder then after I did that then I made that print sheet just like I was describing and so this is something else I did see how there's holes here in the middle that's the one I was pasting them in all the cards actually have that little corner and go back and show you that the cards actually have a little corner here that actually was was white and or it could be transparent and things just worked out easier if I went to my print sheet and I made my print she'd actually have the corners not show up see this is a print frame I just made to demo it to you guys I'll close this one to save print sheets empty frame so fire delete the corners out then when I paste them all in it looks a little bit better and what I end up with is the print sheets that look like this and so all my print sheets now they all say proxy right in the middle and it's all the cards here and notice that there's no space in between them that's so when I come through I can just make one cut and I don't have to then trim all the way to the edge it's just one cut like use like a paper cutting machine like a you know the one with the big lever or the little needle that slides across and you just give these one quick clip and then you're done you know you've got those all out so now let's go back to this guy see ya so let's move these out of the way and that's how you show up with these print sheets like this so you just cut all these guys out and then after you cut them all out then you're going to be left with all the little paper versions like this and when you're left with all the little paper versions notice they're all just white back and they all say a proxy right in the middle right then if you decide you want to you can just clip those little corners off a little snippy snippy just like that and now you've got a card that's all ready to slide into a sleeve and so that's what I've done right here with these ones let me move this up so with these cards though these are real cards and these are my proxies and all that I did is I took a real magic card and I put the real card on the bottom to give it some rigidity right and some weight and then I put the proxy on top of that and then you slide that into your sleeve just like that and now you got a pretty good proxy now you might have noticed I had the scale out earlier that's because you want your proxies to from the outside not be able to tell it's a proxy like from the back of the card or when you have it in your you don't want to feel different right so this is a card what I normally do for my magic cards is they're double sleeved you can see it's real shiny they're right because I got literally two sleeves there's an inner sleeve and an outer sleeve and so there's a little bit more thickness and a little bit more weight and if I put the double sleeve card on here you can see I'm going to 3.49 one of them one of my own grooms right now yeah grams and now if I go to the proxy that had just a piece of paper on it 3.48 grams that's pretty important actually because the card the paper here's the real trick everything else is the same between these two because you got a real magic card inside there right move those out of the way that goes with that you got a real magic card that's actually inside of it so the sleeve and the magic card is the same what's different is you have the inner sleeve versus the sheet of paper and as long as you pick an inner sleeve that's about the same thickness and about the same weight as the printed paper that you've got then your proxy is going to be really close to the actual sleeve which means that when you put them all together you're gonna have something that's really close so again here's a proxy and here's a real card and the the thickness feels about right and the weight feels about right so you put these in your deck and no one's ever gonna be able to tell them that that's a good thing so that's pretty much it for that's the process that I use for actually making proxies I grab the images online I edit them into a print sheet and I print out a wire frame just to make sure I've got all the ink right and everything so I'm not wasting it and I've got about the right size and then I write proxy on all of them so they're all gonna say proxy and it's very clear and then I make my sheets so that's the process if that's all you want to know go ahead and stop the video go ahead and hit like and I hate you I hate it so anyways now I'm gonna soapbox for a little bit the reason why I think proxies are important is there's a huge battle that happens between what I term the collectors versus the play magic there's people that really care about the collection value and like they want in the secondary market their cards not to lose value and they tend to like want to have the highest cards and they kind of hoard their cards and so there's this collector mentality right and some people refer to them as MTG finance and that's outside of the realm of just collectors you know there's those two things are not completely synonymous but anyways you got this collector mentality and then you got people that just want to play the game right and you got these two warring factions and these two warring factions comes out like all over the place like the reserve list and everything but neither side really has more validity than the other side because magic always was a collectible card game it's always been collectible and it's always been a card game neither one is the default right answer they both have valid reasons to actually exist and so for decades now it's been a question of how do you resolve these two worlds and if I could give one thing to the community if I could echo my voice on one topic it would basically be that I think proxies are the answer to that fight and the reason is that the collectors should actually like proxies because proxies allow more people to come in and play in different formats that they wouldn't otherwise have access to as those players come in and then they get in cheaply but then nobody wants to use proxies nobody right you don't feel as good about yourself when you're using a proxy and everyone else is using real cards and there's also just that I mean that collector desire comes out as well my experience with using proxies and working with people that actually that themselves like proxies is that it's a short-term thing they're actually going to want to transition to real cards and so people come in because the proxies are cheap but then they start buying the real cards and so the next thing you know if you only had a group this big that was buying cards but then you let more people in because they all got in because of proxies now they all start buying cards and the demand for the actual cards goes up and it actually raises not lowers the value so the collectors win their win because the card values actually but then the players actually win too because they actually got to play in formats where they didn't previously get to play and so that was a really good thing for them right and so proxies are literally a solution of it fixes the collectors and it fixes the players and I truly believe that the reservations that each one of them has are really they're just they get fixed if you really like have that conversation and talk that out I think those issues honestly all just go away and now about counterfeits versus proxies there's a very clear distinction between them a proxy makes no effort whatsoever to come off as a real card a proxy is just a clear stand-in for a card it's not meant to look real it's not meant to deceive anyone you want it to at least look enough like the card so you can recognize it you can see it across the table and be like oh I know what that is and you want it to have the words of the card on it and the caste cost and all that that's why I don't really like using a sharpie just writing it on because it's like oh wait a minute what was the fourth ability to chase them I don't remember what all the abilities you got to ride a lot of information on because you might not remember it and it doesn't really it's not very meaningful for the other person across the table because they don't get to see in the art they don't if they want if you have on a rules discussion it's not all written down it's kind of nice actually to have the card print it out but it needs to actually look different and that's the reason why putting something on your card like writing proxy right on it is really important so it looks like the real card but it's very clearly not the real card if you make if you buy or make cards they look like they make every attempt to look like real cards that's effectively the same as lying it's the same as counterfeit it's it's not good right and it's not good for the hobby it's not good for anyone the collectors are hurt by that the players get insulted by that the company loses their intellectual property and like what we're trying to do here is we're not trying to make Wizards of the coast lose money we're not trying to damage a secondary market we want to protect their IP what we want to do is just kind of bridge that gap and help people come into the Hobby a bit more cheaply so then they can try and see how much fun it actually is and then they go out and start buying cards of them sell that's kind of the idea here so anyways that's my video that's both how to make proxies and a little bit of soapboxing about how I think they are a good thing for the overall industry so if you guys liked this video I'd love to hear about it I want to hear it some discussions below in the comments thanks for stopping by everybody bye you you

Channel: Edwin the Magic Engineer

Views: 236,667

Keywords: Edwin the Magic Engineer, ETME, Proxies, MTG, Magic the Gathering, WoTC, Wizards of the Coast, How to, Edwin, Vintage Magic, Power 9, Counterfeit, Reserver List, Alpha Investments, Open Boosters

Id: Bd0TLLwa8sA

Length: 33min 53sec (2033 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 20 2019