Keeping league cards current

This whole site started because league cards go stale. A player gains a skill, a stat improves, someone retires or dies, and the printed card is wrong until you make a new one. Here is the routine we settled on after a season of doing it badly.

One file per team, and it is the truth

Every tool here can export a single file holding all your cards and settings. Treat that file as the team roster. Name it with the team and the date, keep it somewhere that survives a dead laptop (a cloud folder, an email to yourself), and export after every session where you changed anything. The browser's storage is convenient between sessions and is the wrong place to keep the only copy; a cleared cache or a new browser takes it with it.

Edit the card the night of the match

Advancements are easy to record while the game is fresh and hard to reconstruct a fortnight later. After the match, open the team, add the gained skills, change the stat if one improved, raise the value, and mark the injuries. Then export. If a player is gone for good, delete the card rather than leaving it; the roster count on the sheet should match the roster on the pitch.

Reprint only what changed

Do not print the whole team every week. Most tools let you select which cards go on the sheet; print the two or three that changed, cut them, and swap the paper inside the sleeve. Keeping a backer card in the sleeve means the swap takes seconds. A team of sixteen reprinted every match is a sheet of paper and a cartridge per season; two cards a match is nothing.

Mark the version

A card that says which match it was last updated after settles arguments. A small date or a match number in a corner is enough; most of our tools have a notes or footer field that will carry it. If two cards for the same player are ever on the table, the later date wins.

Let the commissioner hold a master copy

In a league with a commissioner, the simplest arrangement is that coaches send their export file after each match and the commissioner keeps the latest copy of every team. Disputes about what a player had last week are then settled by a file rather than by memory. The Dugout Press league section does this for Blood Bowl directly: coaches register a roster, the commissioner records results, and the maker can import the team from the league. For other games, a shared folder of export files does the same job.

Print a team pack at the start of the season

On day one, print the full team with the starting roster and sleeve it. That is the only time you print everything. From then on the pack only ever changes a card or two at a time, and by the end of the season it is a record of the team's history, which is half the pleasure of a league.