MPC Fill Guide

Introduction to MPC Proxies

MakePlayingCards.com (MPC) is a Hong Kong-headquartered company that "offers an online platform to create high quality, customised playing cards... at wholesale prices." Ordering cards through MPC uses an intuitive drag and drop GUI where the user uploads print-ready images for each card.

MPC is fantastic for cheaply printing playtest (proxy) cards for casual trading card game play. Cards printed with MPC are not counterfeits, as they're intentionally impossible to mistake for real cards — they don't have holo stamps, typically are labelled as not for sale and have different set symbols, and have different cardbacks.

Some folks in the r/mpcproxies community share repositories with print-ready Magic: The Gathering card images they've prepared, making it possible to print a huge variety of cards with no image editing skills.

Why MPC Fill

Normally, ordering through MPC is very laborious. You have to collect the card images for everything in your order yourself, then manually upload each card, and drag and drop them into the correct slots.

Double-faced cards are also a headache. If you want to order 396 cards and 2 of them have two faces, you have to manually drag and drop your cardback to the other 394 cards.

We make it dead easy to order with MPC. Just paste your desired card list in MPC Fill, and we'll search a wide range of community sources for you. Then, you can customise your order by choosing between different versions of cards and different cardbacks.

Once you're happy, a button press exports an XML file describing your order. Then, a small program will read this file, download every card from the image sources for you, and automatically fill them into MPC.

Usage Guide

1. Customise Your Order

Type the list of cards you'd like to print with MPC into the home page, including how many of each you'd like. Then click Submit to be taken to the review page. Or, can upload a CSV of your card list, which lets you specify what cards should be on the fronts and backs — this lets you easily print one deck on the fronts and one deck on the backs. Download the CSV template here. You can also re-upload an existing XML order to edit it further.

If you'd like to only use some sources, you can click Settings before submitting your card list. Here, you can selectively enable or disable each source, and you can drag & drop to change which sources' cards are shown before others.

Search for tokens by prepending the card name with t: — for example, t:goblin.

The review page shows how your order will be filled into MPC. If a card has multiple versions, use the left and right arrows to page through them. You can synchronise the selected versions of cards as well, by clicking the padlock above the card — e.g. if you'd like the 10th version of 20 copies of a card.

If you misspell a card name or change your mind, you can click on the card's name and input a new search query, which will just change that one card. You can also insert more cards into your order by clicking the Add Cards button in the top right.

Click the card image to bring up the currently selected image's details — you can also download the full-resolution image here. Download all images in your order by clicking the Download All Images button — please note that you must enable popups for this to work properly.

On this page, you can also choose your cardstock and cardback. S30 and S33 cardstock options are the closest to the feel of real cards, with some people preferring S33 (though it's slightly more expensive). Linen and P10 Plastic are options to consider if you like to play with unsleeved cards.

Once you're satisfied with your order, click the Generate Order button. This will download a file called cards.xml to your computer, which we'll need in the next step.

2. Download and Run the Tool

At this point, you're ready to automatically fill your order into MPC! First, download the tool from GitHub. The tool is compiled for Windows, macOS, and Linux. One extra step is required to run the tool on macOS and Linux - see the instructions here. You only need to download the executable, not the zipped-up the source code. Make sure you have Google Chrome installed on your computer as well.

I recommend creating an account with MakePlayingCards now, as it'll come in handy in a bit.

Put your cards.xml file into the same folder as the executable and run it. If you're unsure about running an executable on your computer for security reasons, you can read & download the Python source code on GitHub and run that instead. Instructions for how to run the Python source code are provided.

When you run MPC Fill, it'll do two things:

Create a folder next to the executable called cards and start downloading the images for your order into this folder,
Open an automated Chrome window and navigate to MPC's website. Your order details are specified for you (cardstock and number of cards in order), then your cards are automatically uploaded and dragged to the correct slots. This can take a while, so feel free to do something else in the meantime.

Also — it's completely normal for cards to upload and fill into MPC out of order, nothing to worry about.

Once it's finished, your Chrome window will take you to the MPC finalise order page. Here, you can log in with your MPC account and save it to your Saved Projects, or you can complete the order and enter it into MPC's production system right away.

And that's it! I hope you found this guide easy to understand and follow. If you have any questions, get in touch with us on r/mpcproxies and r/magicproxies! :)