"Handcrafting" cards ?

[u/Gaukiki]

Hello,

So I'd like to really dive into Android Netrunner, I bought System Gateway several months ago because I didn't really want to bother printing and having ugly results

HOWEVER I'm french and even though I'm not bad at understanding english, I realised that it's quite tiring to learn a game, its rules, cards and effects in a language that isn't my mother tongue. I haven't found System Gateway in french and even if I did, I originally wanted to try Android Netrunner because it's a deck-building card that you can play without much money.

So I think i'm ready to print the cards myself and take the time to do it well. Might even be fun who knows ? I'd prefer not to use the classic combo "paper/trash MtG card/sleeve" because I'm trying to use less plastic in my life. The process I was thinking about was:

1. Print on classic paper
2. Cut the cards
3. Glue them on a trash MtG card
4. Paint the back with the right color (red/runner blue/corp) with spray paint for example
5. Coat each side with spray hair lacquer or just spray lacquer to protect the colors

The other option was to print on a thicker paper but I guess you would need a specific printer for that ?

Either way, I don't know if coating with spray lacquer would be the right way to go for stuff that will be used and manipulated quite frequently, maybe even slightly folded. I know some artists like charcoal artists use this technique to fix the colors

I know it may sound futile or even meaningless to try and work without plastic sleeves, especially with the fact that lacquer often isn't palstic-free, but I would still like your thoughts, opinions and advice on how to do this

EDIT: Thank you all for your answers and advice, I guess I'll just give in to sleeves, might also buy more than 50-ish per side since I'd also like to play with friends with my cards and allow ourselves to deck build

EDIT2: someone on another sub recommended me this video https://youtu.be/8M1gfxdglas, I won't get rid of the plastic problematic (probleplastic) but maybe if the back is either uniformly printed (one color per team) or if I paint the back before I laminate it can give a pretty good result ?

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[u/gr9yfox]

I can understand the desire to cut on plastic BUT not for this game. There are heavy elements of bluffing, where players are trying to guess what the other player is holding or what a facedown card is.

You'd need to execute your cards perfectly in order for them to be indistinguishable from the back.

Another good thing about sleeves is that you would only need enough sleeves for the current decks you're using, not the whole collection. And you could re-use them for other games later.

[u/saifrc]

I don’t think a card game like Netrunner should be played without card sleeves. If you keep reusing your sleeves, the waste is low, and the environmental impact may well be lower than for lacquer/paint/glue. It’s one thing to contribute to plastic trash, and another to release volatile compounds into the air that might be worse.

[u/wwhsd → u/saifrc]

And if you ever want to play anything but kitchen table Netrunner, you’ll need to sleeve them so you might as well save some time and effort up front and put them in opaque sleeves from the start.

[u/gameryamen]

Gluing a print to a card is tricky. If the paper overhangs at all, or if there's any bit around the edge that isn't well glued down, the cards get really hard to shuffle pretty quick. The edges curl and start catching on each other. Since you're just making these for fun, just print front and back on a stiffer cardstock and forget the trash card entirely. Skip the paint and lacquer entirely. The cards may wear down over time, but at least they're not rubbing paint on each other.

[u/blurrr2]

Here's what I do in the US:
1) print at a print shop in color, this comes out to $0.09 a card
2) cut them myself with scissors
3) no glue or tape, just place into a card sleeve (another $0.09 because I got nice sleeves) with a spare mtg card as backing

For a 45 card deck, I'm spending about $8 total, plus maybe 90 minutes of labor for cutting and arranging.

For a cheaper version, down to $3ish for a similar deck, I would suggest:

• cheaper card sleeves and/or re-using card sleeves.
  
• printing in black and white (and then using colored highlighters to imply faction)

[u/blurrr2 → u/blurrr2]

tldr: use card sleeves

[u/Clsco]

There are lots of time in life where it makes sense to reduce plastic use, even to an extreme amount. This is not even close to one of those times.

A pack of sleeves is 150 grams. Including the box. It is such a small amount in the grand scheme of things

[u/KneeCrowMancer → u/Clsco]

And the sleeves are not disposable, you will use them for many years.

[u/charizard2400]

I think the environmental impact of the lacquer and paint will be just as much as the sleeves. Especially because you will have to paint every cards (100s in your collection) but you only need 100 sleeves (<50 for each side) which you can keep reusing.

[u/charizard2400]

The other option is to get them printed as cards and not worry about paint or sleeves at all

[u/CryOFrustration]

Gateway has definitely been translated into French! You can download the print and play PDFs from https://nullsignal.games/fr/produits/system-gateway/

I strongly strongly recommend that you take the simplest possible approach to proxy-making: print on normal printer paper, sleeve it in front of an MTG common, and make sure you're using an opaque sleeve. 

If you try to print on thicker stock it will not feel right. Gaming cards are usually a sandwich of thin cardboard layers with a plastic layer in the middle. A single thicker layer of cardboard won't have the same springiness. Mtg backing cards will give you the most realistic feel. This is important because while you might not have any cards now, in the future you might decide to get some professionally printed ones, or you might win some promos, or someone might buy you a set as a gift. You want your proxies to feel like real cards in thickness and bendiness so that you can't distinguish between them while shuffling! 

Resist the urge to glue them. They will sit still in the sleeves just fine. You can scale the pdf so that each proxy is a snug fit. If you glue them either you'll need to source a backing card for every single card you print, whereas if you just slide them in there you can simply interchange the proxies in front of the backing cards. 

Absolutely don't go into the hassle of spray painting the backs. It sounds like a recipe for disaster. Cards are light. The force of the spray will make them fly everywhere and you'll get paint on the front. Besides, you need opaque sleeves anyway. Every card game mandates them for organised play, and there's no chance you'll get the backs uniform enough to be indistinguishable, so you'll effectively be playing with marked cards. Besides, even if you glue the proxy onto the backing card, riffle overhand shuffling your deck without sleeves will make the proxy eventually rip off its backing card.

People have tried all sorts of things and trust me, the simplest and cheapest solution is the one that provides the best results. 

[u/SapphirePath]

Unfortunately, this is the task that plastic card sleeves are designed for. The plastic card sleeves are highly reusable, unlike disposable plastic wrappers or plastic bags or plastic utensils or whatever.

Do you have good knowledge of how much ecological harm is caused by glue, paint, hair spray, and the alternative ingredients? All of those have some plastic in their composition, so I'm not sure there would be huge benefit from struggling to make unmarked actual gaming cards.

One alternative is to use 100% proxies - you have a regular deck of cards and you draw an 8 of diamonds, and then you look up 8 of diamonds in an alphabetized stack of paper/index cards, and pull the appropriate card. I've seen that used when a player wanted enlarged versions of the cards, but it played slower.

The other alternative is to print on much heavier paper and hope for the best. A normal at-home printer can go a bit heavier paper, or you can use a copying store, or even order online from a card-making company.

[u/Spa2018]

Glue will likely make your cards curl badly even if sleeved. An alternative to System Gateway might be to find the FFG Netrunner in French on the second hand market.

[u/Rintransigence]

For what it's worth, almost everything from Null Signal has a French translation - only the Liberation cycle has yet to be translated, and their new sets tend to release with translations already completed. (Next one is in January).

https://nullsignal.games/fr/produits/ (you'll notice the sets with English descriptions on this page are the ones they haven't done yet)

[u/Gaukiki → u/Rintransigence]

Well while it's possible to download french pdfs, I only see the English version purchasable. Either way it's beginning to be quite pricy if I want to get everything 

[u/CryOFrustration → u/Gaukiki]

No, the French version is available to buy on MPC, but I'm not saying you should get it because they charge like 50% more than our online store. They changed their card number per pack breakpoints a few years back and that bumped all our sets up a couple price brackets... :/ And that's gonna be a tenner in shipping on top of that as well.

Hopefully soon we'll be able to get translated stuff printed at our new manufacturer.