Fan cards & proxies: what to know

Three different things people mean

'Custom card' covers three distinct practices, and the norms around each differ:

• Original cards — your own world, characters, and frames; entirely yours, no constraints
• Fan cards — cards inspired by an existing game or franchise (a card of your favorite character, a 'what if' design); creative tribute, made for fun and sharing
• Proxies — stand-in copies of real cards used in casual play, usually while testing a deck or when the real card is unaffordable

The common-sense ground rules

This isn't legal advice — it's the etiquette the community broadly agrees on. Fan content lives in a tolerated space that stays healthy as long as it stays non-commercial: make fan cards for yourself, your friends, your playgroup, your subreddit — don't sell them, and don't pass them off as official product. Most publishers have fan-content policies that say roughly this in longer words.

Proxies are a table-rules question: casual playgroups usually welcome them (test the deck before buying it), sanctioned tournaments prohibit them. Ask the table; label the proxy.

The style-vs-copy line

There's a meaningful difference between a card in the style of a genre (an HP number, attack lines, a mana-like cost — game grammar no one owns) and a copy that reproduces another game's exact logos, set symbols, and trade dress. Card Forge's templates deliberately live on the style side: familiar structures, original frames, your data. That's also the creatively interesting side — your dragon in a familiar grammar is a design; a pixel-perfect replica is a photocopy.

Make the original thing

The secret ending of most fan-card hobbies: after ten fan cards you have opinions about card design, and opinions want their own game. That jump costs nothing here — save your own template, define your own rarities, build a set with its own pack odds, and suddenly you're not making fan content, you're making a world others make fan cards of.