FAQ - Design

Why do these look the way they do?

This project has two foundational priorities:

There are priorities built on top of this, like providing additional accessibility tools where able, but these two are the main points that guide the project. This pragmatism means stripping down a lot of what makes a Magic the Gathering card look good and "Like a magic card". Design elements that make the proxies be readable as clearly referring to a Magic card and its properties are present, but many have been toned down or stripped away.

I don't think these proxies look bad in any way but I do recognise that they don't have the same aesthetic pull as Magic: the Gathering cards do, but that wasn't the priority. Another designer tackling the same task would probably come up with at least a fairly different approach.

Will you support custom cards?

The dependency for this kind of tool is the ability to export a list of custom cards in the same structure as JSON responses from the Scryfall API (though not every single field), as that is the structure that the renderer expects. I do not know of any custom card tools that do this, let me know if one exists.

Why do planeswalkers have the legend crown?

Planeswalkers are the only card type that don't have a legend crown in-print since the introduction of the legend crown in Dominaria. I feel like this design choice is inconsistent and I disagree with it especially when we have planeswalkers that can make nonlegendary copies of themselves.

If you want to disable this, the current way of doing so is disabling the legend crown option and generating a pdf of planeswalker proxies using those settings.

I have an accessibility option suggestion / feedback on existing options

Please do get in touch, this tool can be a means of stapling accessibility features onto Magic card design rapidly and if it's feasible I'd be happy to do it.

What does "This is an acorn card" mean?

In 2022, the silver border notation for cards from unsets was retired in favour of a small acorn symbol at the bottom of un-cards. See here for details. Mystery booster playtest cards will also get the "this is an acorn card" reminder as they're in the category of "funny" cards in scryfall's API.

I think the way you've handled the content-warned cards lacks nuance

I don't think that the method currently implemented (original or whatever else gets used afterwards) is perfect or even works well and I'm open to refinements based on discourses that arise from things being as they are now. I'm not going to make snap decisions, but I am going to keep an ear out and ask around for how to go about this best I can. It's not something I can handle necessarily well on my own, though I'm still in the position to make the decision as to how it's handled, and I want to dissuade the use of those cards and not be associated with them due to this project.

I think you should let me print out as many unedited proxies of [Content-warned card] as I want

Nah.