Review: We Tested MTGProxy.com — Was it Worth It?

Last updated on February 28, 2025

There are a lot of places out there to get proxies, custom proxies, and cards printed. Many of the websites in this space definitely give off “shady vibes,” so it's important to find somewhere you can trust to actually deliver on your order.

Will you ever get your cards? Are they coming over on the slow boat from China?

What's the quality like? Could I have done a better job with my own laser printer? Or Sharpie marker?

Today I'll be reviewing one of the biggest players in the space — MTGProxy.

If you just want the tl;dr and my bottom-line assessment: MTGProxy is one of the better sites out there to order from — they have tons of ordering options, reasonably fast shipping, and very solid card quality.

A Quick Note About Proxies

It seems like every single week in a Magic Facebook group or on Reddit, someone is posting about proxies. They're a topic that generates a lot of impassioned discussion, mostly because every time they come up, everyone starts arguing about the affordability of Magic and how “WotC makes the game too expensive to play.”

There is increasing acceptance of proxies in certain situations, especially provided you are not trying to use fake cards and pass them off as real or using them in tournaments where they're not allowed. If they people in your play group are fine with you using printed proxies, then read on.

What Is MTGProxy.com?

MTGProxy is an ecommerce store that sells Magic proxy cards, custom cards, proxy booster packs, and facsimile holofoil stamps.

While their proxy boosters are very novel (as far as I know they and PrintingProxies are the only ones that do this), I would say they are best known for their ability to print and ship out any large list of cards you want, on demand.

This could even include an entire deck or an entire cube all at once.

According to the domain registry, their domain was registered in 2018. I only became aware of the store a couple years ago myself.

As far as trust signals go, they have a support ticketing system and over 200 reviews on Trustpilot with an average 4.8 rating.

OK, seems legit enough at least. Let's try to place an order and see what happens…

Placing an Order

For this test, I decided to try the “little bit of everything” approach. If I'm going to do a test for you, I may as well try the full range of products, you know?

First up, a couple proxy boosters.

We reviewed these already here and found them to be a pretty decent value.

I grabbed two of them.

Some of the best uses for these is to inject a ton of power into a chaos draft or to give as a surprise gift to a friend. The guaranteed floor of “equivalent value” makes them a lot more exciting to open than regular packs.

Next up were the holo foil stamps. MTGProxy.com has two different types of these.

One is similar to the “normal” stamp you see on foils:

The other looks more like the Universes Beyond style triangle:

I guess you are supposed to stick these on the bottom of your proxies after you get them. I'm curious to see how they work out. Will they stay stuck?

Next up, I decided to get some of the top cards for Commander. I went with a big stack of cards — 50 in total — to simulate filling out a Commander deck.

I was surprised when I clicked on their top cards link in the header of the website that it went off to their partner site, PrintingProxies:

Eventually I realized that you could go below the top section on their home/main ordering page and compile a card list there directly on MTGProxy.com:

You can also search for specific card names and find versions of them:

One delightful (and sometimes weird) thing is that people also can submit custom proxies. Yes, I opted for a saucy Leo DiCaprio card (you'll see it later). Why not?

You can click on “Display: Top” to see the most popular custom designs.

Once you've loaded up your card list it's time to pick styles.

I also decided to foil out a few of the cards I was ordering, so I just clicked the “FOIL IT” box on the user interface:

You get a choice between two different types of foils. I picked the “normal” looking one.

Overall I was really impressed with the selection and options for customization. Basically any card or style I could imagine, I could get.

And if it wasn't there, I had the option to submit a custom design to create it.

I think the user interface was a bit finnicky and frustrating in places. I tried to order the proxy boosters first, but after adding the custom cards to my cart, it wiped out all my previous ordering! I had to re-add everything to the cart.

The Checkout Process

Checkout was very smooth, and a bit easier than the ordering and adding to cart process.

I just entered in my billing and shipping details…

I could pay by credit card or Paypal. After entering in my payment info, my order was received and confirmed!

Here's their interface for showing your order in progress:

Finally, I got a confirmation email with my order number so I could track it inside their portal.

Shipping and Notifications

And then it was time to wait. The day after ordering, I could see inside the portal that my order had been printed.

And a day after that I got an email that it was shipped:

And a total of four days after my initial order, I received it. Not too bad!

Overall, it felt like the amount of time it took to print, pack, and ship my order was completely reasonable. Many overseas proxy sites take forever to send you your order, so for this type of product the timing is very fast.

The email notification workflow went well and I could actually see that my order was being worked on (and that they weren't just stealing my money).

Okay, now that I have the product, it's time for the fun part — let's get crackin!

Product and Unboxing

My shipment arrived in a pretty compact bubble mailer. It was pretty fun to get home and find it in my mailbox. No worries about package thieves that way.

Mail day!

Inside I had my two proxy boosters, plus a plastic-wrapped package containing everything else.

The foil cards were packaged separately (probably due to a different or additional printing process) than the regular cards. All 50 cards I ordered were there!

My order was accurate and as described.

Just to recap, I received 40 non-foil cards, 10 foil cards, 2 proxy booster packs, one sheet of regular foil stamps, and one sheet of Universes Beyond foil stamps.

Everything looked good.

Proxy Booster Opening

Well let's start with the most exciting part — who doesn't like tearing into Magic boosters?

Here's the full video of me opening the booster from beginning to end:

It was really fun tearing into the pack to see what I got. Since it is full of proxies, you have the potential to get cards from all across Magic history with a wide variety of borders, art styles, and format applicability.

As you can see there I got some pretty amazing “value” with a Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer, Beta Plateau, Mana Crypt, and The One Ring among others!

Buying the equivalent cards on TCGplayer would cost me thousands and thousands of dollars (vs $10).

In fact, the cost per card for this product is quite low — $0.63 each for 16 cards, which is lower than the on-demand proxies sold by MTGProxy.

I could see getting a few packs of these as a great foundation or inspiration for building out a cube. Or mixing up your existing cube with some new, pretty looking cards.

Opening the pack was slightly difficult, but that also can be the case with regular Magic booster packs, to be fair.

Oh, and there was a coupon code inserted into the pack.

Here are all the pulls from both packs I got:

As you can see, lots of dual lands, Commander staples, crazy expensive cards, and other alternate art rarities.

Quality and Feel

I think this is the most important thing when you're deciding whether it's worth it to order proxies or not — do they feel like real Magic cards?

If not, then you may as well just bust out that Sharpie instead.

Overall Card Features

I was quite pleased with the weight, heft, and thickness of the cards. As far as I could tell, they conformed to all the required specs for the size of a Magic card.

Picking them up and flipping through them felt more or less just like real cards.

Of course, unlike real cards, you can do some pretty unusual things with proxies.

Here are a few examples:

• Custom art (note the Django Unchained reference…)
• Crazy Secret Lair art or alters if you wanted to have those printed
• Alchemy-only cards!

Haha, I don't know why you'd actually want to print out Alchemy's digitally rebalanced cards, but guess what – you can! There's Ocelot Pride.

One thing that surprised and impressed me was that they can do Dual-faced cards. I know that is a more complex printing task to do, but MTGProxy passed that test with flying colors.

As far as the print quality of the cards, it was pretty good. Certain cards were excellent, and basically looked like real cards — for example my Secret Lair Supreme Verdict and my Nature's Lore. Other cards, however, looked a little less sharp and high-res.

The rainbow foils had a bit of a thick, plasticky coating on them, which wasn't my favorite. They definitely seemed glossier, but not quite foiled out in the same way as regular cards.

Overall, these are clearly not real Magic cards, so your expectations need to be in line with that. They are definitely good enough to use, and as you'll see later, once sleeved the differences are even less pronounced.

The Card Backs

In order to make it very clear that the cards are not trying to masquerade as real cards, MTGProxy prints on the back explicitly that the cards are proxies.

I would call the designs Magic-esque…

Not really a big deal for me, I am not looking at the back of my cards very often. (Unless I'm Morph-ing…)

Foils and Foil Stamps

OK, so what about those foil stamp sticker sheets?

First of all I would say I definitely recommend using tweezers to apply them if you have them. The sticker stamps are very small and I found it kind of hard to place them exactly without using some kind of tool.

I did manage to get one nicely onto this Cyclonic Rift, though:

And here's a video so you can see how the holographic effect looks.

This one was great, so if you want the front of your modern rares to “feel more real,” this is certainly a decent way to do it.

The Sleeve Test

Of course, we have to try these cards in sleeves to get a full assessment of how good they are. If you're invested enough in Magic to be ordering proxies, you're probably sleeving all your decks, right?

I wanted to figure out if they looked and felt just like real cards when sleeved up, or whether they felt somewhat off. If they're twice as thick as a regular card, it would pretty much be a nonstarter if you planned to mix them with your other cards (like lands).

It's hard to see in the picture below, but I thought that the foil cards were a bit harder and less clearer to see through the sleeves. The normal cards were completely fine, but the foiling effect on the other cards seemed to be magnified by the plastic (cheap) sleeves I was using.

Here's a comparison of a proxy Scorched Ruins with a random basic land out of my box. They look essentially the same:

Once you sleeve em up, things are good.

The Shuffle Test

Here I was really afraid that once I shuffled the proxies, I would be able to easily tell them apart from real Magic cards.

I think they definitely felt stiffer at first while riffle shuffling (I've riffle shuffled a lot of cards in my life). For the mash/side shuffle, they were completely fine. Here's a video of me shuffling them:

The main thing you probably get out of this video is how bad I am at shuffling a Commander-sized deck. I usually play Limited, so sue me!

I also tried topdecking and drawing cards to see how they felt coming off the top — the answer was great. As I was peeling off basic lands and proxies alternatively, I couldn't tell any difference in the feel of the cards.

I would be completely fine mixing this with regular cards in a “proxies allowed” game.

My Verdict

I think MTGProxy's cards are a great value for what you're getting. If you think about spending $1K on a Commander deck to get all the cards from TCGplayer or $10K or more on a cube, that can be prohibitively expensive.

That same EDH deck will cost you like $75 and the same cube like $300 if you get it on MTGProxy.

Are these real cards? Do they look exactly like real Magic cards?

No.

But you are not buying real Magic cards, you're buying “fun” playtest proxies.

And they are way, way better than anything you can print out yourself. Could I accomplish this level of feel and quality with my laser printer?

No way.

So if you want proxies, go for it.

The Bottom Line

MTGProxy's cards are more than sufficient for playtesting new cards, and their product is a lot better than many low-quality proxies I've seen elsewhere. The proxy boosters are a fun product and I'm already thinking about adding one into my next chaos draft!

I hope this review was helpful. Feel free to ask any questions in the comments and be sure to follow Draftsim on Twitter/X for more in-depth MTG articles and reviews.