Reviewed: The Best Custom MTG Card Sites & Apps

Last updated on May 20, 2025

Whirlermaker | Illustration by Victor Adame Minguez

Have you ever sat down to a game of Cube or Commander and seen somebody drop just the coolest proxy you’ve ever seen? Maybe it had custom art, maybe it was a reference to some show or anime, but it was something special. Or perhaps you’ve had the idea for a custom Magic card or six, but you don’t know how to go about bringing it to life.

That’s where MTG custom card makers come in. These sites or programs have all the tools you need to make your Magic fantasies into a tangible reality you can download or even ship off to a custom proxy site.

Today, I’m guiding you through which custom card makers are great, with a few examples of my own creations.

What Is a Custom Card Maker?

Doomed Artisan | Illustration by Victor Adame Minguez

Card makers are websites or applications with templates and tools to design your own custom Magic cards, using your own art, text, and frames. These sites streamline the card design process and often allow you to download a file version of the card, usually a .jpg or .png file. These are useful to send the card to your friends or order a custom proxy through a service like Printing Proxies.

Are Custom Magic Cards Legal?

From a law perspective, yes, custom Magic cards are legal for personal use only. You can't sell them or pass them off as real cards, and you can't register them in sanctioned tournaments.

If you get a custom Magic card printed, it’s at best a proxy, and should be fine for casual play. Players likely won’t take issue with new art on a regular Magic card—for example, if you put a picture of your cat onto Arahbo, Roar of the World—you’re fine. But truly custom cards, with your own effects and stuff, are a harder sell. But hey, if you’re a good enough salesman you might be able to convince a pod to let you play them. I’ve also heard of people including their custom designed cards in Cube, which sounds like one of the best places for it.

Features of a Good Card Maker

What separates a good card maker from a middle-of-the-road or bad card maker? You should keep your eye on these criteria.

Simple Interface

While making a card can be complex because you have so many different decisions to make, navigating the card maker shouldn’t add to the complexity. The more complex the interface becomes, the weaker the card maker becomes in my opinion—unless it offers some wild power to go with it.

Options

You want as many options for the parts of a card as you can get. How many frames does the card maker offer? Are you able to use all the mana symbols, including hybrid mana or Phyrexian mana? Do you have control over the size of your art, its position, and so on?

Price

Is it free? This is very much the kind of site you expect to be free. Offering a handful for nonessential premium features or advertising the site’s Patreon are one thing, but if all the features are locked behind a paywall, the site probably isn’t worth your time.

Save Options

Does the card maker let you save your custom designs to come back to later? This might not be a deal-breaker for you, especially if you just want custom art on an existing Magic card, but it could be a deal-breaker for iterative designers.

Why Use a Card Maker in the First Place?

Efficient Construction | Illustration by Jonas De Ro

You might think these sites are unneeded; after all, can’t you do all this in Photoshop or Gimp? And yeah, you totally could! Except it would be far more finicky.

Small errors on Magic cards are incredibly notable, and Magic cards have very precise designs. If you’re experienced with those programs, that might not be an issue, but it could be overwhelming for a newbie. It’d have a far higher learning curve than selecting a frame and uploading art.

Now, if you want to do something incredibly innovative with your custom card, like introducing a custom frame or weaving together text and image like some Secret Lairs do, Photoshop/Gimp is likely the way to go. But if you just want to make a version of your favorite commander with an image of your pet or something similarly sentimental, or you want to see your idea for a custom card come to life, card makers are just what you need.

How to Make a Custom Card

There are a few things to consider when picking out your custom card:

• Color: What color will it be? This can be obvious from the effect; for example, your cool counterspell should be blue, your hasty creature is likely red, a card that cares about power is green, and so on.
• Card Type: This is a critical part of the card that defines much of the next two bullets. An effect on a tame enchantment could be completely broken if it appeared on an artifact instead, because of how the support between the two permanent types varies. If you have an idea that you know should be a permanent but are stuck on the specific type, consider what makes the most flavorful sense.
• Mana Value: How much will this thing cost? A lot of balance and care goes into choosing the cost of a card, more than I can express here, but looking for similar effects on existing Magic cards can give you an idea of a fair cost—for example, a ramp spell that puts two lands into play ought to cost 4 mana, per Explosive Vegetation.
• Abilities: What does the card actually do? You probably began here, unless you went for a top-down design based on something you like. To make your card’s abilities sound legit, look for cards with similar effects. For example, if you have a novel take on giving a spell in your graveyard flashback, borrow Snapcaster Mage’s templating to make sure you don’t make it overly complicated.
• Art: This is the trickiest bit. I personally use art from existing Magic cards sourced from mtgpics.com, which has a host of awesome, high-quality Magic art. They don’t have images for every card, but I’ve always found something. Make sure you credit your artists!

There are other things to consider, like rarity, but those are the big factors you need to consider when making custom cards. Don’t be afraid to use existing Magic cards as a resource to find inspiration or make sure your cards are realistic (unless you want to design joke cards like 10,000 Emrakuls; in that case, go nuts!).

#6. Magic: The Gathering Card Maker

Magic: The Gathering Card Maker gets all the points for its simplicity. All your options are laid out in one area, including the options to save your cards. Notably, this is also the only card maker on the list that allows you to make custom cards for other card games, which could be fun depending on your interests.

That said, it’s a little lacking in features; you don’t get to use any special mana symbols like hybrid or Phyrexian, and it even restricts the number of colored symbols you can add to five each. You can make the argument that you don’t need more, but the option would be nice. With that in mind, and similar limitations applied to the frames, this site is just a little too bare-bones to rank super highly, though it works in a pinch.

#5. Card Creator for MtG

Card Creator for MtG is an app available for Apple devices that allows you to make custom cards, with very simple, bare-bone options. After you create the card, you can publish it to the Card Creator community, where people can view, like, and download the cards.

I found using the app moderately annoying, but that had more to do with creating a custom card on my phone than the app itself; it’s perfectly functional, and you can get the hang of it in a few moments. I wish the app offered ways to engage with the community beyond liking each other's cards. I could get pretty excited about Card Creator if it was a proper forum.

As is, it just seems less convenient than any of the websites, with less customization options. If you regularly have ideas for cards without access to a laptop or computer, I suppose it works, and there’s always the convenience factor to consider.

#4. MTG Cardsmith

MTG Cardsmith is fine. It’s clunkier than other options and the text formatting can be pretty wonky; you need to manage it via spaces, paragraph breaks, tabs, etc., as well as altering your text size. And the text comes in small, medium, or large, without any finer control.

Overall, the cards look a little jankier. This is a fine option if you want to slap together a quick proxy to show your friends thanks to its super simple interface. MTG Cardsmith also sells proxies of your custom cards, though I haven't used the service itself so I can’t vouch for the quality. That could be quite convenient if you don’t want to worry about exporting and uploading this into another proxy service.

Making an account isn’t necessary to use the card maker, though you need one to save cards. If you get a premium account, you unlock additional features like a custom set marker; thankfully, nothing essential is locked behind the paywall.

#3. MTGNexus

MTGNexus is just a little better than MTG Cardsmith, offering more customization features and better control over the text. I especially like that you have so much control over the text box and I think it just looks more like a Magic card than Cardsmith creations.

MTGNexus also has extensive forums for the custom cards and Magic more generally, so you can get feedback on your creations and improve your card design. This site’s pretty crisp, though I immensely dislike that you need to register for an account to use any of the custom card features. That might just be a me thing though, so I wouldn’t hold it against the site too much.

#2. Card Conjuror

Card Conjuror is an incredible site. It has a dead simple interface with tons of customization options and plenty of ways to use them.

My favorite part of this was the card art search feature, which finds any existing Magic art and plops it right into your frame:

All the other sites require hunting down the art from a site like MTG Pics before uploading it—which you can still do here, if you have custom art to upload. The only reason this didn’t take the #1 slot was the lack of a save feature and the handful of missing frames. You can download your cards, but you can’t save part of a design and come back another day, which is the only flaw in this diamond.

#1. MTG Set Editor

MTG Set Editor (MSE) sets itself apart from the others as an offline card designer. You can download it and run it directly on your computer; you need no account or internet to get designing. It has a bit of a learning curve, but it offers some of the best customization features.

The offline aspect can be slightly inconvenient since you can’t start cards on one computer and open them on another, but you can simply email yourself the file or stick it into the cloud or something and download MSE on your second device. MSE looks like the best card maker for the dedicated custom card making enthusiast.

Honorable Mention

One site that may come up in your quest for the best card maker is falseblue.com, a card maker designed by Ben Cranton. The pet project grew pretty popular, but Ben chose to shutter the project in 2024 due to time and security concerns you can read about here.

Where to Find Fan-Made Cards (and Inspiration)

Some of these sites—notably MTGNexus and MTG Cardsmith—have attached forums to share your cards, get feedback, and check out other cards for inspiration. Card Creator technically lets you share cards, but the lack of comments makes it far less than a forum.

You can always head to Reddit, with the thriving r/custommagic community welcoming every design, from the meme-iest joke cards to the most serious attempts at making something that could conceivably be a Magic card.

You can also check out Discords; MTG Cardsmith has one, and many Magic-themed Discord servers might have channels specifically for custom cards; I know the ones run by 3/3 Elk and Maldhound do.

Bonus: Set Editors

These sites are fine if you want to make one or two custom cards, but what if you wanted to go all the way and make a full set? Well, you have two options.

You could use MTGNexus, which lets you make full sets instead of individual cards, and you can even publish the set to let others view it and give you feedback. The community outreach is the sole reason I’d recommend it.

Otherwise, you should just use MTG Set Editor. Any cards you make are automatically saved to sets, you don’t have to worry about your internet or anything, and it’s just the best custom card maker. The fact that it does sets as well means it has the most flexibility on top of the best interface, and the nicest looking cards. It really deserves that #1 slot!

Wrap Up

Brenard, Ginger Sculptor | Illustration by Marta Nael

Creating custom cards is honestly a lot of fun, and there are plenty of reasons to do it, from a desire to stretch your creative muscles as you come up with the Next Great Magic Card to a desire to sneak some sentimentality into your next Commander deck. However you do it, these sites provide excellent resources to get started!

Have you ever made a custom Magic card? What’s the coolest custom card you’ve come across? Let me know in the comments below or on the Draftsim Discord server!

Stay safe, and thanks for reading!