Show HN: Cardstock- Free TCG Proxy Manager for Magic, Yugioh, & Pokemon
44 comments
·January 8, 2025danielvinson
Love the idea and technology - I’d much prefer if the output of this was an MPC order since that’s how almost everyone is making proxies these days. Getting my entire cube printed was only about $100 and they are indistinguishable from real cards.
adenta
The joy of proxies is you can do whatever you want! My take was to not make these seem as real as possible, and one where you can print on demand.
Imagine a proxy only tournament of any card game, where you have to submit your decklist ahead of time and it is waiting for you when you arrive, ready to play and keep.
pickledish
This looks pretty cool, and is definitely useful! Do you have any examples of what the printed out cards look like? Perhaps in comparison to real cards
adenta
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1AzIBAE7VPQMfqq-gVFTK...
The red bordered cards are the ones I just printed, real cards are on the right. Also all are US sized, the real yugioh cards are slightly smaller than that.
I tried to get a couple diff angles and card types. Like I said, totally good enough for my use cases!
pickledish
Wow, they look great, the upscaling seems to have gone really well!
adenta
let me go print some!
trigonated
Having your home page be just a login button is a bit disappointing.
There's no screenshots and no information about how it works (or information at all for that matter), which doesn't really convince me to create an account (in my mind, the process of picking a deck and printing it is not one where requiring a login would be obvious, so some more "convincing" might help).
I don't want to sound mean-spirited, but I'd guess many people would similarly refrain from creating an account for the reasons mentioned above.
Edit: Turns out there's a cool scrolling cards animation as background! It's just that it doesn't seem to work on Firefox so there it just has a blank background.
theogravity
I agree. Without this post, if I visited the page without any prior knowledge, I'd have no idea what this is about, and would have no incentive to sign up.
adenta
The only way I'm showing people this website is a personal text or this hacker news post, which I would hope gives enough context.
trigonated
Fair enough. Sorry for sounding a bit mean.
I also saw your other comment about the "test" account (didn't feel like replying on both places). Thank you for that.
trigonated
Maybe some sort of "guest mode" where you could use the site, pick a deck and preview the printing (maybe a very small image), but then required an account to not lose the deck or actually getting the printable would be pretty reasonable.
That said, maybe there's some other advantage to having an account that I just didn't think of.
adenta
If you want to play around with it, try account hn@example.com with password hackernews!
I didn't add any restrictions on email registration because I hear you that actually creating an account can be a chore. Exposing web services to the public internet without auth seems scary, which is why I rarely do it.
nafey
Just adding a static website with screenshots of the product will be a great upgrade for users who are interested to learn more before signing in.
snapcaster
but also the chat function doesn't do anything unless you supply an email. Seriously without your post text here it's literally impossible to figure out what your site does exactly pre-account creation
lxgr
> I didn't add any restrictions on email registration […] Exposing web services to the public internet without auth seems scary
Aren’t you still effectively doing that, though?
This seems like the combination of two downsides: Bots will be able to perform email verification if they want to; honest users will still be deterred.
adenta
great point-
bot protection is enabled in clerk, where email registration is not.
dgrove
Also login over a VPN unless you want your IP leaked to everyone else
cmg
For anyone else trying this, the password is hackernews - without an exclamation point. Tripped me up.
Thanks for setting this up adenta!
null
meta_1995
oh man. if you could get the SWCCG holotable slipped in here... i'd be a very happy elder millenial. https://github.com/swccgpc/holotable
jsnznsb
A work of passion, congratulations!
popalchemist
Why do you say Kamal is a game changer?
adenta
You don't have to pay a tax to render.com! You can just buy a linux box and be off to the races.
ianferrel
Wizards of the Coast is relatively litigious. I'd expect a Cease and Desist if you get any traction with this.
mercwear
WOTC has a (surprisingly) good proxy policy: https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/announcements/proxies-poli...
TL;DR: Use them all you want for play testing but don't use them in events or for trading.
Edit: They DO want a watermark for proxy cards, not sure they enforce that much since most proxy sites make it optional.
ianferrel
I mean... maybe?
It says
"A playtest card is most commonly a basic land with the name of a different card written on it with a marker. Playtest cards aren't trying to be reproductions of real Magic cards; they don't have official art and they wouldn't pass even as the real thing under the most cursory glance. Fans use playtest cards to test out new deck ideas before building out a deck for real and bringing it to a sanctioned tournament. And that's perfectly fine with us. Wizards of the Coast has no desire to police playtest cards made for personal, non-commercial use, even if that usage takes place in a store."
So they say that they have no desire to police them, but define them as not using original art and not passing for the real card even briefly. Those descriptions do not apply to high-resolution original art card images printed out.
adenta
Yeah I wonder why https://scryfall.com/ never gets a C&D.
I think the problem is money changing hands which isn't happening.
supernewton
Wizards of the Coast's in-house card database (Gatherer) is basically not maintained at all. I think they're very happy there is a third party willing to do that for free, and for a game with as much history as Magic, having a searchable card database is basically mandatory.
adenta
but IANAL and would love to hear from any that might read this.
null
piyuv
I saw the sign in screen and immediately closed. Limitlesstcg exists and can be used without an account.
adenta
Will Limitlesstcg let you print proxys? That's the main thing I'm doing here.
piyuv
Of course: https://limitlesstcg.com/tools/proxies
adenta
Thank you! This is nice, but looks like just Pokémon.
arschfick
[flagged]
mercwear
For MTG fans, checking out https://mtgprint.net/ may be worth a shot too. No login required and same results.
adenta
I really like my search interface.
If you want to play around with it, try account hn@example.com with password 'hackernews'
rc5150
At the risk of repeating what others have said, your page requiring the user to create yet another account for something that has no business requiring an account is an immediate non-starter.
Your search function could have puppies and rainbows but it surely doesn't do anything worth creating an account for.
mercwear
+1, I dont want to have to login to a simple service like this. The only value a login provides IMHO is the ability for the site owner to sell my info. Probably not the case here but never can tell and not worth the hassle when I can just use existing resources that work fine and require no login.
null
Trading cards are awesome, but paying $30 for some cardboard isn’t. I’ve upscaled 60,000 cards from the entire catalog of Yugioh, Magic, Pokemon, & a newer game, https://elestrals.com. I've made it easy to build a decklist, download it, and then print at home. Modern inkjet printers got really good when nobody was looking. While it’s clear they’re not real cards, the upscaling makes them look great for casual play (these are not tournament legal). It’s totally free, give it a try!
Supplies: https://cardstock.denta.co/kb/supplies Printer Settings: https://cardstock.denta.co/kb/settings Instructions: https://cardstock.denta.co/kb/instructions
Overview: I built Cardstock because I had some scripts to do this lying around, and wanted to explore the new Rails 8 magic. Kamal 2 (kamal-deploy.org/) is a game changer, SQLite in production is fine, and the database backed solid family of gems work like a charm.
Compute: I am renting a box on https://hetzner.com located in VA for $15/mo. This box has 8 gigs of ram and 2 vCPU's. This is such a deal compared to compute prices on https://render.com.
Kamal 2: This thing is amazing. Kamal gives me everything I could want (easy console access, easy shell access, a way to manage secrets, a way to see my logs, and letsencrypt support for DNS), all without a PaaS tax. The best part is the accessories feature: https://kamal-deploy.org/docs/commands/accessory/. I am running my main app with two accessories: Meilisearch(https://meilisearch.com) and OpenObserve (https://openobserve.ai). Instead of paying Algolia to host search infrastructure and sentry to host monitoring infrastructure, I’m hosting my own OSS without any fanfare.
Upscaling: To upscale the trading cards (a mandatory part of this build, scans are never high enough DPI). I am using this (https://replicate.com/nightmareai/real-esrgan) model. For upscaling every card, I've used under a hundred bucks of compute. This model was picked on a whim, but worked well enough that I didn’t compare other models.
SQLite: I used SQLite combined with Litestream (litestream.io) for my database. While I considered Postgres, I hesitated due to uncertainties around handling backups on self-hosted infrastructure. This was my first time using SQLite in production, and it was functional but with some minor annoyances. Here’s what I encountered: 1. No Default UUID Primary Key Type I had to set primary keys as strings and assign IDs manually from the application record. It’s an annoying workaround but manageable. 2. No Native Array Columns Because SQLite doesn’t support array columns, I had to use its native JSON column type, which just felt icky. If I were working with something like embeddings, this would be especially annoying, because you couldn’t enforce all the records to have the same number of dimensions. 3. Cryptic Errors At one point, a migration failed silently, leaving a cryptic error in schema.rb. The issue was resolved by rolling back the migration and redoing it, but it was once again, annoying. 4. Litestream Defaults Litestream deletes snapshots after 24 hours by default, which is far too short. When I tried to recover some data, I found it had already been deleted. Adjusting these defaults fixed the problem.
Solid Queue/Cache/Cable: The solid family of gems are all backed by the database and were a pleasure to work with. Goal was to prevent needing to reach for redis, so you have one less thing to worry about. You end up with a little more latency, which is a totally reasonable tradeoff.
Conclusions: We are moving into a post platform as a service world. Instead of buying a bespoke render.com or heroku, you just buy commodity compute and use Kamal to manage. It's like, pretty much all there, excited to see how this space matures.