Cutting and sleeving

A straight cut matters more than a perfect print. A card a millimetre small in a sleeve is invisible; a card with one slanted edge is the one everyone notices. Here is how we cut ours.

Three tools, in order of preference

A guillotine (a lever cutter with a long blade) gives the straightest edge and cuts a stack of three or four sheets at once. Small office ones cost about the same as a box of sleeves. Set the gap between cards to zero in the tool, line the blade up with a cut guide, and every cut serves two cards.

A rotary cutter on a cutting mat with a steel ruler is nearly as good and takes less space. Use a fresh blade; a dull one drags the paper and leaves a ragged edge on heavy stock. Cut away from your fingers, and cut all the vertical lines before any horizontal ones so the sheet stays in one piece as long as possible.

Scissors work, with a gap of 2 to 4 mm between cards so that a wobble lands in the gutter rather than on the next card. Cut the sheet into strips first, then the strips into cards. Expect to lose a card or two per batch until you get the feel for it.

What the cut guides are for

Our sheets draw hairlines in the page margins at every card edge, the way a print shop's proof does. They never cross a card or a gutter, so there is nothing to trim off afterwards. Line a ruler up with the mark on the left margin and the matching mark on the right margin, and the line between them is the cut. The marks are drawn as borders, so they print with background graphics off; turn backgrounds on anyway for the cards themselves.

Bleed, and when you want it

If a card has a coloured edge, a cut that lands a fraction of a millimetre inside it leaves a white sliver. Bleed is the fix: the card's edge colour is extended 2 or 3 mm beyond the trim line, so the cut can wander and still land in colour. Our tools offer 2 or 3 mm of bleed and draw a small green tick straddling each trim corner, so you can see the trim through the bleed. Bleed takes space, which is why a sheet sometimes drops from four cards to two when you switch it on; the tool tells you when that happens. Cards with a white border do not need bleed at all.

Corners

Printed cards have square corners. Official cards are rounded, and square corners catch on sleeves and on each other. A corner rounder punch, sold for scrapbooking at a few pounds or dollars, fixes that in a second per corner; the 3 mm radius matches most game cards. Round them before sleeving, and do not bother for cards that go in front of an old card inside a sleeve, because the old card's corners carry the sleeve.

Lining up double-sided cards

However careful the printer, the back will be offset from the front by a fraction of a millimetre, sometimes a full one. Three things hide it. Cut to the front's guides, never the back's, so the side people look at is right. Keep a gap between cards so the offset lands in the gutter. And design the back with a safe margin, which is why our card backs keep anything that matters a few millimetres from the edge. If a printer is consistently off in one direction, most drivers have an alignment or offset setting for duplex that corrects it once for every job.

Sleeving

Match the sleeve to the card size from the card sizes page; a loose sleeve lets the card rotate and looks worse than no sleeve. Slide the card in with a slight bow so the corners do not catch. For a paper print that needs stiffness, put it in front of a card-stock backer or an old card; this is also how you update a league card later, by swapping the paper and keeping the sleeve. Store sleeved cards flat or in a deck box; a rubber band around a stack of sleeves bends the lot.