Proxies, printed right: 3×3 sheets, double-faced cards, and skipping what you own
Proxy print is one of those features that sounds simple until you actually try to do it. Here's how ManaScry's print queue works, what we got right, and the new "don't proxy what I already own" filter.
Proxy a Magic deck and you'll discover roughly seven things that should be easy and aren't.
The cards print at the wrong size. The double-faced cards print only one face. The tokens never print at all. Your printer eats half a tree because you forgot to set page count. You can't tell which cards are queued and which aren't. You print the same Sol Ring you already own four copies of. You finally get a clean 9-card sheet and realize the bleed is wrong for your cutter.
ManaScry has a proxy print queue. We built it to handle all of these without you having to think about any of them. This post is the practical tour.
The flow, end to end
/dashboard/proxy (sidebar under Decks). The queue is a personal staging area for cards you intend to print. Add cards a few different ways:
- Search and click — top-right card search, click any result, card lands in the queue at quantity 1
- Bulk paste — paste a deck list (Arena/MTGO/ManaBox formats), every card resolves through Scryfall, queue updates
- From a deck — open any deck → "Proxy this deck" → entire 99 (or 60) lands in the queue. Optional: skip cards you already own. Optional: include tokens scanned from oracle text.
When the queue has what you want, hit Print View. New tab opens with a print-ready preview. Hit Cmd+P (or your printer's button). Done.
What "Print View" actually does
Open the print view and you get a sequence of pages. Each page is a 3×3 grid of MTG cards at exactly 2.5″ × 3.5″ — the real Magic card size. Standard letter paper, 0.25″ margins, 9 cards per page.
That sizing is non-negotiable. If proxies don't come out at exactly 2.5×3.5, they don't sleeve correctly with real cards. We hardcoded the dimensions in real inches in the print stylesheet so the browser's print dialog can't drift.
Each tile pulls the high-resolution PNG from Scryfall. No upscaling, no compression artifacts. The print quality is whatever your printer + paper combination can do — we just hand it the best source.
4× Lightning Bolt in your queue prints as four Lightning Bolts on the sheet, not one tile labeled "×4". Same logic for every quantity. If you queue 100 cards total, the print view emits 12 pages with the last page partially filled.
Double-faced cards, handled
Magic prints a lot of double-faced cards: transform creatures, MDFCs, sagas with reverse sides, the Innistrad werewolf cycle. Most proxy tools print only the front face. Then you sit at the table and try to figure out if your Delver of Secrets has flipped or not.
ManaScry's print queue detects DFCs at queue time and emits both faces in sequence — front first, then back. So a queue with 1× Delver of Secrets prints two tiles: front (Delver), back (Insectile Aberration). When you cut the sheet, you have both halves of the card and can sleeve them back-to-back.
DFC tiles get a small "DFC" badge in the queue UI so you can see which cards are double-faced at a glance.
Token detection
Most decks rely on tokens. Most proxy tools forget to print them. ManaScry's "Proxy this deck" flow scans the oracle text of every card you queue and pulls out token references — Treasure, Clue, Food, Soldier, Spirit, Saproling, Goblin, Cat, Dragon, Angel, Beast, Wolf, and the rest of the common cycle.
The detected token names get added to your queue automatically. Toggle off if you don't want them. Toggle on by default for Commander, where token sourcing is the most painful manual step.
It's a heuristic, not magic. We catch the common patterns ("create a Treasure token", "create a 1/1 white Soldier creature token") but miss the oddballs (Marit Lage, named tokens from one-off cards). Good enough for 95% of decks.
The new filter: don't proxy what you already own
This one shipped last week. The proxy queue is now collection-aware.
If you have a card in your collection — any printing, any condition — it shows up in the proxy queue with a small Owned badge. You can see at a glance which entries are wasted prints.
A new filter chip on the proxy page lets you switch between All / I own / Don't own. Pick "Don't own" and the queue filters to just the cards you're missing. The Print View link respects the filter, so you can print exactly the cards you don't have without manually deselecting anything.
This matters most for the "proxy a 99 to test it before buying expensive cards" workflow. You queue a $500 Commander deck, flip the filter, and print only the eight cards you don't already own. Saved cardstock, saved ink, less cutting.
- Build a deck (manually or with import)
- Click Proxy this deck with "skip cards I own" enabled
- The queue lands with only the cards you're missing
- (If you want tokens, leave that on too)
- Toggle the Don't own filter to double-check before printing
- Hit Print View → print the sheet → cut → sleeve over basics
- Test the deck in person without buying cards you might not keep
Export to other tools
Sometimes you don't want to print at home — you want to send a deck to Make Playing Cards (MPC) or Printerstudio for premium proxy stock. The queue exports to:
- TXT (Arena/MTGO format) — paste into anything
- CSV — spreadsheet-style for inventory tracking
- Cockatrice .cod XML — for digital playtesting first
- Print View — the in-browser sheet described above
MPC-Autofill format is on the backlog and will land later. For now, pasting the TXT into MPC-Autofill's parser works.
Sharing proxy lists
If you and a friend are both running the same playgroup proxy set, you can share a list rather than each rebuilding it. This is also on the backlog (share_token for proxies, mirroring how lists already work). Once it ships, you'll be able to send a public read-only link to a proxy queue and they'll see exactly what you queued.
What we don't do (and may never do)
- Crop marks / cut lines. Coming. Not in v1.
- Bleed area extension. Hard problem because the source PNG doesn't have artwork outside the existing card border. Possible with creative sampling. Not soon.
- Custom card art. Out of scope, possibly forever. If you want to design custom proxy art, you have better tools than ManaScry. We just print the official Scryfall image.
- Print at non-MTG sizes (e.g., Pokemon, sports cards). Magic is the entire product. Other TCGs have their own tools.
Why we built this the way we did
The TLDR is: most proxy tools treat printing as a feature checkbox. We treat it as the core flow. Card size, DFC handling, token detection, ownership-aware filtering — every one of those decisions exists because someone (often me) tried to print proxies somewhere else and got burned by an annoying gap.
If you've been printing proxies the hard way, give the queue a try. And if you find a gap we missed, the feedback link in Settings lands in our actual inbox.