How To Make Playing Cards At Home [Ultimate DIY Cards Guide] | Card Game King (2024)

Tired of all these boring deck designs? Are you just looking for an awesome gift or have you always dreamed about designing a custom deck of cards?

Whatever the reason, every card player should have their own custom deck of cards. You can DIY it and make them yourself or you can just send the designs to be printed professionally.

We’ll cover both options in detail here. From simple DIY decks to complex production-like quality, there is a project here for every skill level.

How To Make Your Own Playing Cards

Making your own playing cards at home is a great DIY project. Depending on the quality of the final product you desire, you can either go all out or just create simple cards.

We’ll cover some of the easy ways of making and playing with your own cards for those that are interested in a quick project, but the real meat of this article will be a step by step guide to making professional quality playing cards at home.

Let’s knock out some of the easy approaches to DIY playing card making first.

How do you make simple playing cards?

The absolute simplest way to make your own custom playing cards is to design your cards on Canva, print them off on regular printer paper at home and slip them into a card sleeve with a real playing card.

Here are the steps to make simple playing cards at home.

What you’ll need

• A boring deck of cards
• 52 matte card sleeves (Check price here)
• Canva
• Color printer
• Ruler (or other straight edge)
• Craft knife (Check price here)

Steps

1. Start a new design on Canva with custom size of 2.5 inches width and 3.5 inches height.
2. Design your cards. Canva has every suit and all kinds of free graphics you can use.
3. Copy the each card to a Google doc or Word doc side by side. Note: You’ll need 52 copies of your back design if you have one to make your deck
4. Print your sheets
5. Using the ruler as a straight edge, carefully cut out each card
6. Get your boring deck and the card sleeves. Insert one back design, any real playing card and then one of your new cards into each sleeve.
7. Repeat for all cards and you’re done!

You’ll notice that your new deck of cards is considerably thicker and harder to handle than a normal deck of playing cards, but hey, this was pretty simple right? Think of this more as a prototype.

You can play with these cards and change out designs without having to use any glue or premium paper. If you are looking for a more production feel, keep reading!

How do you make playing cards with pictures?

You can make your own playing cards with pictures by just using your own uploaded photos in Canva to design your cards. Just know, that high quality photos will use up a lot of ink in your printer so make sure you have high resolution photos that aren’t going to print blurry.

Thinking you want something that more closely resembles a production deck of cards? Tired of the kiddy project above and ready to go professional?! Well, here it is!

How to Make a Custom Deck of Cards

When trying to find the best approach to making playing cards at home, we are trying to accomplish a lot of things. We want the correct thickness of the card, the correct flexibility of the card, and most importantly, the feel.

So in order to replicate that production look and feel, we need to explore how real playing cards are made in the first place to see if there is an at home equivalent that can get us close.

What material are playing cards made of?

Playing cards are made of paper, plastic and vinyl. For the purposes of this article, we are focusing on paper playing cards.

Production playing cards are usually multiple layers of paper and laminates. Unfortunately, it is not cost effective to be able to exactly duplicate the materials and process card manufacturers use for a one off custom deck so we have to get creative.

What you’ll need

• Linen Paper 32lb (Check price here)
• Linen Cover Stock 65lb (Check price here)
• Spray Adhesive (Check price here)
• Rotary Cutter (Check price here)
• Ruler
• Corner Punch (Check price here)

Steps

1. Design your cards on Canva and copy them side by side to your document the same as above.
2. Bring the file to a professional print shop. IMPORTANT: DO NOT PRINT AT HOME!
3. Print the back design on the linen cover stock. IMPORTANT: Print on the textured side. NOT the smooth side.
4. Print the front designs on the linen paper. Again, print on the textured side.
5. Bring your printed card sheets home
6. Don’t cut out cards yet! If you laid out your documents correctly, each back design sheet should line up perfectly with a front design sheet.
7. Spray some adhesive on the back design sheet. (Obviously spray it on the blank side)
8. Wave the sprayed sheet slowly so the adhesive starts to tack up a bit.
9. Align the sprayed sheet with one of the face design sheets flat on a table so that they perfectly overlap. You can make minor adjustments to alignment and once satisfied, lay a heavy book on the two glued sheets.
10. Repeat for all the printed sheets.
11. After letting the glued card sheets set for a couple of hours, it is time to cut.
12. Flip each sheet so that the face designs are down and you are looking at the back design. Using a ruler and the rotary cutter, cut vertically and then horizontally until each card has been cut out.
13. Repeat for all sheets.
14. Finally take each card and using the Small (3mm) side of the corner punch tool, round all four corners of each card.
15. And you’re done! Pfew! That was a lot of work!

You still will notice that this deck is slightly thicker than a normal deck of cards, but they feel pretty darn good for a DIY project.

This isn’t cheap or easy, but it is rewarding! If you just want to see your custom designs on real playing cards and don’t want to go through the whole process of making them yourself like above, check out the end of the article to see where you can send your design to get turned into professional playing cards.

Can a Cricut make playing cards?

So you may have been confused with why I suggested using an old fashioned rotary cutter instead of a fancy machine like a Cricut. Frankly, you’ll have better results doing it manually.

While some Cricut users have reported being able to successfully cut out printed playing cards. There are too many stories about inconsistent cuts that I wouldn’t want to risk screwing up all the work I had already done to design, print and glue my cards.

How do you make playing cards look vintage?

Are you in love with that antique, vintage look? Well there are actually a couple ways to accomplish this effect. If you are printing your own cards using the steps above, you can actually buy vintage paper. Just make sure that the poundage and material is similar to what is described above.

If you are trying to antique a deck of cards, the best way honestly is just to use it a lot. Basically do the exact opposite of all the things we describe in this article on making a deck of cards last longer. Don’t wash your hands. Riffle shuffle hard and excessively and so on.

If you want something a little more stained and old looking, you can try an approach like what is shown in this video.

Sound like too much work? Custom made decks on demand!

Was that more than you bargained for? If not, good on you for being ambitious with this big of a project with DIY playing cards. If you just want to make the designs and see them come to life on a professionally manufactured deck, you can send your designs to a custom print on demand shop like Artscow.

They will do a way better job than any DIY project for sure, but for some people, that takes away all the fun. Whether you are going to actually make your own playing cards at home or send them off to be made for you, I think every card player should have their own custom deck of cards.