I enjoy Magic the Gathering, but I hate that it’s leashed with copyright and patent stuff, and basically pay to win with Wizard’s bogus artificial scarcity. You take a look at classics like Chess - no one owns Chess, it’s public domain. Consequently we get a continuous stream of gameplay variants, as well as all manner of Chess sets with virtually any feature and style of art you can think of.
But I realized that even though proxies are kind of a gray area, that doesn’t mean I have to treat them like they have less value than “official” cards. What if there are proxies with truly inspired design and artwork, for example? If people are putting their time and heart into these, why not boost that?
Does anyone here know of any great MTG proxies?
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This isn’t really an answer to your question, but you should honestly try Netrunner. It’s a cool game that previously was originally created by Richard Garfield, briefly lived at WotC and then was rebooted and run by Fantasy Flight Games as Android: Netrunner, but now is 100% community managed.
https://nullsignal.games/ is the community managing the game, they release new expansions about once a year and run tournaments. You can print and play the game 100% for free and there is no artificial scarcity. The community is small but active. A new expansion just came out in early March, Vantage Point. They also maintain a set of “starter decks” for newbies.
You can also play online for free at https://jinteki.net/ - people there are very welcoming and many are very happy to teach new players.
Lauren Bobert is pretty close
It’s been a minute since I last tried it, but: Forge: The Magic: The Gathering Rules Engine https://card-forge.github.io/forge/ & https://github.com/Card-Forge/forge
It’s essentially MTG: Shandalar - but free & opensource. So basically you start with some starter deck, roam the lands to defeat color-coded wizards and dungeons for ante-cards and money (which you use to just buy cards from vendors), build deck, and ultimately defeat the elemental gods etc. Shandalar. :)
The game has actual MTG cards (can be downloaded via the game’s menus).
It’s no less commercialized, and it’s not physical, but I’ve been playing Hearthstone for mostly free for over ten years. Plays like MTG, but faster, and implements a lot of randomization that’s near impossible to do with physical cards.
I enjoy Magic the Gathering, but I hate that it’s leashed with copyright and patent stuff, and basically pay to win with Wizard’s bogus artificial scarcity.
Not exactly what you’re asking for, but Magarena is an open-source Magic: The Gathering clone.
No artificial scarcity there.
Assuming you’re talking about original art I think Etsy is your best bet. Sometimes eBay has some. You also get some really cool altered art where they extend the background etc. Its not cost effective though and there’s a lot of ai art now. My rule of thumb is anything over 4$ gets proxied now for a deck. There are sites like https://tolarianlibrary.com/ that do pretty good 1:1 copies that pass the sniff test for casual play. I really really hate when art is economically locked, philosophically art should be for all. I try and always proxy the prettiest version of cards. The secret lair copies aren’t perfect but their pretty darn close. There’s a handful of other sites I can DM you that I trust. To answer your original question I think there is a site for proxy designs, but they don’t give you the cards just the designs.
