User Guide

User Guide

Skeleton — sections below are planned, not all written yet. Migrated from the wiki's own User-Guide page (previously hand-maintained there directly) — this file is now the source; the wiki page regenerates from it. See documentation-process.md.

Searching for cards

How to search the catalog, read search results, and pick a printing for a slot in your decklist.

The Editor page (the redesigned /display route - nav+footer redesign, 2026-07-22, renamed the nav link from "Display (beta)" to plain "Editor"; the classic /editor page is still reachable directly by URL but no longer has a nav link of its own) search bar is dual-mode: an Add / Browse toggle next to the input switches between adding cards to your project (the usual decklist-line paste/search box) and browsing the whole catalog without touching your project — browsing renders a grid of matching cards you can add individually, and the center of the page follows the same toggle, switching between your print sheet preview and the browse results. The + Add Cards dropdown next to the search box covers the same Text / XML / CSV / URL import options available elsewhere in the app.

You can also type Scryfall-style search operators straight into the search box to narrow results, instead of (or alongside) plain card-name text: artist: (or its short form a:) filters by illustrator, border: and frame: by border/frame style, tag: by community tag, set: by three-letter set code, and lang: by language code — for example artist:"Rebecca Guay" border:black or -tag:foil to exclude foil-tagged results (put a - in front of any operator to exclude instead of include, and quote a multi-word value like an artist's full name). An operator the site doesn't recognize is dropped from your search and flagged rather than silently treated as part of your card name. See features/search-operator-syntax.md for the full operator list and how matching works under the hood.

Picking a card's printing (the art picker)

Once a slot has a card in it, clicking/tapping it on the sheet opens a panel showing every piece of art available for that card, so you can pick exactly the version you want — or help identify one that isn't confirmed yet. Results are grouped: the community-confirmed real Magic printings come first (one representative image per printing, with a "+N more" to see the rest), then art that's known to be custom/altered/ AI-generated, then anything with no identifying information yet, last.

Above the grid, a row of filter chips (Border, Frame, Treatment, and similar) lets you narrow the panel down to a specific style — tap a chip on, and the grid shrinks to just the art matching it; tap it off to see everything again. Picking a card while one of these chips is active does double duty: it selects that art for your slot, and quietly registers that the card supports the style you filtered by. A short note appears above the grid before you pick, spelling this out plainly — it always says your pick supports the tag, never that it confirms it outright, because one pick is one data point toward the community's consensus, not a final verdict on its own. If you change your mind and pick a different piece of art afterward, your earlier pick's support is automatically withdrawn. Cards whose printing/style is already community-confirmed never prompt this — only ones still open to community input do.

Right-clicking (or long-pressing on a phone) a card on the sheet, or tapping its small "⋯" button, opens the same actions menu you'd get from the panel above — swap art, remove the card, and the rest of the per-card actions in one place.

"What's That Card?" — helping identify printings

ProxyPrints crowdsources which real Magic printing a community-submitted card image depicts, so search results and filters (Full Art, Borderless, etc.) can be more precise. If you spot the vote queue while browsing, here's what it's asking and why your input helps everyone's search results.

The vote queue at What's That Card? presents each question as a quiz-reveal hero: the card image in question starts covered by a blue placeholder with a "?" on it, fading away to reveal the real art once it's loaded, and sits in its own column on a deep-blue hero field (with an animated starburst behind it, visible at every screen size) alongside a title that pops into place word by word every time a new card is shown, while the actual question — the candidate printings or attribute chips to pick from (each shown as its own "?"-marked placeholder until its art loads too) — sits in a scrolling panel beside it. On a wide screen that question panel scrolls on its own while the card stays put, so you never lose sight of what you're being asked about. Every action button on this page ("Filter by attribute", "None of these", the candidate-grid answers, and the rest of the quiz's yes/no/skip controls) uses a gold outline that fills solid gold when you interact with it, chosen for readability against the page's own dark-blue background rather than the site's usual orange.

On a phone, the layout instead stacks vertically: the card renders above the question, sized to leave room for everything below it, with its name, a "Suggested match"/"Needs identification" tag, and the question text directly underneath — nothing sits beside the card at this width. Right below that, "Filter by attribute" and the answer buttons ("None of these", "Art matches, not an official printing", "Skip") sit in a compact block that's always fully on-screen, so resolving a question never needs any scrolling. Only the candidate tiles (when the question is a printing pick, not a yes/no confirm) scroll — sideways, in their own row below that block — since there can be more of those than fit on screen at once. The title itself also switches to a single-line wordmark on a phone screen, rather than the three-line stacked version a wider screen shows, so it takes up less room.

Exporting a print-ready PDF

How to arrange your chosen cards into pages, set bleed/DPI/paper size, and export a PDF ready to print and cut.

The Editor page's Page Setup section defaults to Letter landscape, 3.175mm bleed, and a Margin profile picker (Borderless / Bordered / Rear-feed) calibrated against an Epson ET-8500/8550 printer — Borderless is the default and the only profile that fits full bleed on a 4-across sheet; the other two trade some bleed for a printer-supported margin, and the page warns (rather than silently shrinking your bleed value) if your current bleed exceeds what the selected profile can fit.

The same section's Card spacing (mm) control sets the gutter between cards independently on each axis — Horizontal (X) and Vertical (Y) default to 0mm and 14.5mm respectively, so columns butt together for strip-cutting while rows keep a gap that suits a die cutter. A Link/Linked toggle next to it locks the two axes to move together when you'd rather set one value for both.

Once your sheet is ready, the Editor page's Finish footer has two equal-weight buttons: Save Deck (or Sign in to Save, if you're not signed in) and Print / Export →, plus the existing Export dropdown for lightweight XML/card-image/decklist exports and a small cloud-download counter beside it (nav+footer redesign, 2026-07-22 - this used to sit in the top navbar; it now lives next to the exports it counts, here and again on the Print page). Your project is also quietly backed up to this browser as you work — a small "Draft backed up locally" note under the buttons confirms it — and pressing Print / Export → while signed in with unsaved changes offers to save your deck first, since the print/PDF step can use a lot of your browser's memory and you don't want to lose your work if it struggles.

Saving and re-using a project

Local-folder and Google Drive options for coming back to a project later. If you're signed in and have saved decks already, the Editor page's empty-project landing screen lists them directly so you can jump back into one without a trip to My Decks first (My Decks itself has no nav-bar link since the 2026-07-22 nav redesign - reach it from this landing screen, the homepage's own CTA, or /myDecks directly).

Saved decks, export, and the standalone decrypt tool

Signed in with Discord? The classic editor and the Editor page's Save button persists your deck to your account, and the My Decks page lists everything you've saved, decrypted right there in your browser — the server only ever stores encrypted, opaque bytes it can't read.

My Decks also has Export my decks and Import decks buttons: export bundles every saved deck into one downloadable file for backup or moving between accounts/instances, and import decrypts a previously-exported file (with your passphrase or recovery key) and adds its decks to your current account. If this site ever goes away, your exported file is still readable on its own — a small, dependency-free command-line tool (decrypt-saved-deck-export/ in the repo) decrypts it using nothing but Node.js's built-in crypto, no ProxyPrints server or codebase required.

See features/saved-decks.md for the full design (including the zero-knowledge encryption model and per-deck share links).

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Have a question this page doesn't answer yet? Open an issue on the repo, or check the wiki Home page for other resources.