What you actually need to buy

I've been printing decks at home for years and my setup is boring. A laser printer, a stack of 200 gram matte paper, a Fiskars rotary trimmer. That's most of it.

But I only own one of each, so this isn't a review roundup. What I can give you is the specs that matter, which I've learned by getting them wrong, plus the models that keep coming up when people who do this seriously talk about their kit. Where I name something, take it as "this is what I'd look at if I were buying today" rather than "I've tested this."

The first two posts in this series covered when to use print and play and what the files actually are. This one is the shopping list.

One thing to say up front, because it shapes everything below. Almost all the good knowledge about printing cards at home comes from board game hobbyists, who have been at this for decades and know far more than I do. But they're building a different object. They want a card that shuffles, riffles, and hides its face when somebody holds a hand of them. Their advice is tuned for that.

Workshop cards go face up on a table, get read, sorted into piles and argued over. Nothing gets shuffled hard, nobody's hiding anything. So a fair amount of what that community treats as essential turns out to be optional for us, and it's worth knowing which parts to skip rather than spending money chasing a card that behaves like a poker card.

Printers

Almost everyone gets caught by the same thing. A printer's spec sheet says something like "media weight up to 300gsm" and you assume you're fine. Then you try to print cards on both sides and it jams, or it refuses outright.

That's because printers have two different weight limits and only one of them gets advertised. There's what the machine will take through its manual or rear feed, going in a fairly straight line. And there's what it'll take in automatic duplex, where the sheet has to be pulled back inside and reversed. The duplex number is always lower, sometimes dramatically. One popular office colour laser takes 163 gram stock through the multipurpose tray and only 105 in auto duplex. Another is rated to 300 through the manual feed, and its own users report that double-sided cardstock jams it.

So plan on printing one side at a time and feeding the paper back yourself. Once you accept that, automatic duplex stops being a feature you care about, which flips the usual buying advice on its head.

What I'd actually check, in order:

Does it feed the weight you want reliably, through a manual or rear slot rather than the main tray. Is the paper path straight or gently curved rather than bending sharply, because a sharp bend is where thick stock crumples. Does it put the sheet in the same place every time. What does it cost to run. Then colour quality. Then, last and barely, duplex.

"Supports cardstock" on a box means nothing. The numbers are the gsm rating per tray and the duplex rating, listed separately, and manufacturers publish both if you go looking.

Laser or inkjet

I use laser and I'd choose it again. Toner comes out dry, so I can cut immediately instead of waiting, and it doesn't smudge when a deck gets handled all day by twelve people. It's faster, which matters when you're printing several decks. And it sits unused for a month without clogging, which suits how I work.

The honest counterargument is that inkjet does better colour. If your cards are photographic or heavily illustrated, with gradients and subtle tones, a six-ink inkjet will beat a laser and it won't be close. Refillable tank models have also made colour printing cheap enough that the old "ink costs more than the printer" objection has mostly gone away. My decks are type and flat colour, which is exactly the case where laser wins, so my preference tells you as much about my decks as about the machines.

Models people recommend

On the inkjet side, the Epson EcoTank ET-8550 comes up constantly and has for years. Six inks including grey and photo black, A3+, refillable tanks, and a rear feed rated for media up to 1.3mm thick. It's expensive, and dye inks are less water resistant than toner, and like all inkjets it wants using regularly. But for illustrated decks it's the one I see recommended more than anything else.

The Epson EcoTank ET-8550. Product photo: Epson.

On the laser side, the Brother HL-L3280CDW is the interesting one at a normal price, rated to 300 grams through the manual feed. Users say auto duplex on cardstock jams it, which by now you'll recognise as expected rather than a fault.

The Brother HL-L3280CDW. Product photo: Brother.

Above that, the OKI C650 takes 256 grams from both its standard and multipurpose trays, which is unusual for a compact colour machine, and it's built for in-house graphic work. It costs around six hundred euros before consumables, so it's a club or studio purchase rather than a personal one.

The OKI C650. Product photo: OKI.

The one I'd steer you away from is the general office colour laser that everyone recommends because it's reliable. They're good printers. They're rated around 163 grams through the multipurpose tray, which is fine for rules sheets and paper inserts and not enough for cards.

Paper

I print on 200 gram, matte or semi-matte. That's my whole paper opinion. I don't like glossy, which is personal, and plenty of people are perfectly happy with it.

Two hundred is roughly where most laser printers stop being comfortable, and it feels like a card rather than like paper. If you want to go heavier you're generally looking at an inkjet with a rear feed.

Here's a good example of something to skip. Commercial playing cards are built differently from home cardstock, quite apart from being thicker. They're multi-ply, with a dyed blue or black core sandwiched between the two white printed layers, and that core exists to stop light passing through the card. Home cardstock has no core, so buying heavier paper gets you stiffness and does nothing at all for opacity.

Board gamers care about this a great deal, and they should, because a card you can read through is a card that leaks information to the player sitting opposite. Casinos use black core stock for exactly that reason.

For a workshop deck it barely matters. The cards are face up on a table. There's nothing to leak. The only time I'd think about it is a deck with very dark faces and pale backs, used in a bright room, where you might catch a ghost of the front showing through. If that's your design, print a test card and hold it up to a window. Otherwise let it go, and don't pay for heavier paper hoping to fix an opacity problem you don't have.

For laser paper in Europe, Mondi Color Copy and Clairefontaine DCP both come in 200 and 250 gram and are made for colour reproduction. I'd test before committing to a big pack, because paper and printer combinations are weirdly specific.

One more caution, in the same category. Don't buy linen textured paper because the word sounds professional. Linen finish exists to help cards slide past each other when you shuffle, which is a problem workshop decks don't have. Real linen on commercial cards is pressed in after printing anyway, so textured craft paper isn't the same thing, and deep texture can soften fine detail. Smooth and correctly coated will print better.

Cutters

This is where I have the strongest opinion, and it's the one thing in this post I'd insist on.

Most rotary trimmers are worse than their reputation. The cut lands in a slightly different place depending on how you press, so you get cards that don't quite match, and you'll blame yourself when it's the tool.

The failure has a name. It's called head swivel, and it means the cutting head rotates very slightly on its rail as you push it along. Manufacturers know about it and design against it, which is how you can spot the good ones. Rotatrim describes one range as having a large single square guide rail to prevent head swivel, and another with twin rails that they say eliminate it entirely while giving a smoother action.

So the spec to check is the rail. Twin rails are the safe answer. A single square rail is fine, because a square section can't rotate in its housing. A single round rail has nothing stopping the head turning, and that's the one to walk away from. Nobody puts this on the front of the box, so you'll be reading the detailed specs.

The Rotatrim Pro series is what serious people seem to use, twin stainless rails, and a 12 inch model handles A4 with room to spare. Dahle professional trimmers come up often too. I use a Fiskars, which does the job.

The 12 inch Rotatrim Professional M12.

Guillotine cutters cut stacks, twenty five to fifty sheets in one stroke, and in theory that's your production speed problem solved. I don't stack. On a rotary the sheets slide against each other as the blade passes and the cards at the bottom come out different from the ones at the top, and I've never got a result I was happy with.

Which means one sheet at a time, which puts a ceiling on how much I'll make at home. One deck is fine. A handful is fine. Past that I'm looking at a whole day with a blade, and the answer stops being a better cutter and becomes a print shop. Volume is what presses are for. Grinding through a big job at home because the file was free is a bad trade, and I've made it once or twice.

Corner rounders

Square corners are the clearest visual difference between a homemade card and a bought one, and rounding them is cheap and slow.

The Sun-Star Kadomaru Pro is the one everyone uses. Three radii built in, 3mm, 5mm and 8mm, press the lever, clean cut. Which radius suits a playing card is oddly contested. Sun-Star's own packaging says 5mm for playing cards. People who actually make cards say 3mm, and commercial poker cards sit around 3 to 3.5, so I'd go with 3 and treat 5 as a deliberate choice if you want a visibly rounder look.

The Kadomaru Pro with its 3mm, 5mm and 8mm settings. Product photo: Sun-Star Stationery.

Be realistic about the time. These punches take about three sheets of ordinary paper, and struggle with two playing cards, so on real cardstock it's one card at a time. Four corners each, so a 54 card deck is 216 presses of a lever. It's never a money decision, only a time one. I round corners for a deck I'll use for years or hand to a client. I don't bother for a prototype.

If you're doing hundreds of cards regularly, a lever-operated metal die rounder is faster. The thing to check there isn't the "heavy duty" label, it's whether it has fixed guides that locate every card in exactly the same position.

The cheap way out

Worth knowing before you spend anything.

You can skip most of this. Print your cards on ordinary 90 to 120 gram paper, slide each one into a card sleeve in front of a cheap standard playing card, and use that as your deck. The donor card gives you thickness, stiffness, rounded corners and the opaque core your paper doesn't have. Fronts and backs are separate sheets, so the alignment problem disappears too.

It costs you sleeves, a bulk pack of cheap cards, and the fiddly work of stuffing them all. Be honest with yourself about the look, though. This is the board game prototyping method, and it reads as one. A sleeved paper card says work in progress, which is fine in front of a client who knows they're seeing a prototype and wrong in front of one who doesn't.

For a deck that's changing every week it's hard to beat, and it works with whatever printer you already own.

That's the series. When to use print and play, what the files are, and what to buy. If you're starting from nothing, start with the sleeves and a printer you already have, and only buy the trimmer once you know you'll keep doing this.