When I work, I build the image up in layers. It can be sometimes difficult to find high-quality scans of cards, but you can scan a less-rare card for the backgrounds, put in the text yourself in Photoshop, and then it's really just the main image you need to worry about. Around the time I was doing this, Ebay was only a couple years old, but it became SUPER easy to find high-quality scans of cards online to put into a template.

So I put together my digital file and turned to professional printing companies. I had a long list of specifications for the "fan cards" that I wanted to print, and I figured these were the same sort of guys who made real cards, so they should do a good job. But as soon as I sent them my tentative descriptions of my order, I got a crushing email reply. "We only print original designs owned by the requesting client or public domain designs," they said. A reputable printing company won't even photocopy an encyclopedia page for you. They live and die by copyright law.

Wizards of the Coast

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And while most people might not see this as the same as printing a run of your own cash, it absolutely is.

That left me one option: a disreputable printing company. I won't tell you which one; I'll just say I found it on the internet, and it's based in Asia. My initial inquiry got a broken-English reply and the amount they would charge me, so I figured this company was a bit more lax when it came to copyright. Then I emailed my PDFs, and they sent me a bill that was $200 more than the estimate. "You motherfuckers know exactly what I'm doing, and you're just trying to get your cut," I muttered to myself. But it was worth it.