Improve your Yu-Gi-Oh! proxy cards gameplay experience

Even though it's possible to play using proxy cards simply cut out from the sheets printed with the YGOprint proxy deck tool, this is not how most players choose to play

Making your proxy feel like real cards

To make the experience more realistic and enjoyable, you can instead buy sleeves designed for real Yu-Gi-Oh! cards
(You can find them for just a few cents each on websites like Amazon or AliExpress, they usually come in pack of 60 or 100 each)

In these sleeves, you then insert low-value real Yu-Gi-Oh! cards
(which you can also get by buying bundles of common cards for just a few cents each),
or cardboard of the same size as real cards, and place your printed proxy cards in front of them

Make sure the sleeves you pick are slightly larger than the size of real cards,
for example with a size of 62mm x 89mm (which gives you exactly 3mm of extra space in each direction)

This way you get the same shuffle feeling as a real deck, and your cards will be harder to distinguish from the back, just as the rules require

Making proxy cards easier to recognize at a glance

The proxy deck tool is designed to print black-and-white cards with the printer you already have at home (or one borrowed from a friend, your library, or your workplace 😉), without using expensive color cartridges or toner, which many people don't even own anymore

But that doesn’t mean you have to give up on playing without colors
A very useful feature of color in Yu-Gi-Oh! is that it helps you instantly recognize a card’s type by its background

You can replicate this quick recognition in any way you like, for example by coloring the card image border with a marker matching the corresponding color

• yellow - normal monsters
• orange - effect monsters
• green - spell cards
• fuchsia - trap cards
• blue - ritual monsters
• purple - fusion monsters
• white - synchro monsters (leave them uncolored)
• black - xyz monsters
• light blue - link monsters

For link monsters you can also color their arrows red
For pendulum monsters, you can color their pendulum zones blue (left) and red (right)