Custom Trading Card Sources?

September 20, 2006 7:43 AM

I'm interested in getting some custom trading cards made, something slick along the lines of the Moo cards...

Okay, so I’ve gotten some great leads from AskMeFi when I was looking for custom stickers and custom buttons (and am excitedly awaiting my first order from Busy Beaver, thanks for the suggestion 40 Watt!) Now, after reading the article on BoingBoing today about Moo, the company that takes your Flickr pictures and prints them out on cool little 28mm x 70mm cards, I got to thinking about having custom trading cards made.

Back when I was an announcer in the wacky world of independent pro wrestling, I worked with some really great guys, and thought it would be cool to make trading cards for them. I did the whole thing by hand, printing the fronts and backs separately four-up on an inkjet printer, carefully aligning them and cementing them together and cutting them out individually. This process was rather labour-intensive, and I only made two sets, one for myself and one so that every wrestler could have their own card.

Now I work with a comedy theater group, and am thinking about making trading cards for everyone in the company. My question is, does anybody know of a good source for this sort of thing that they could recommend? A quick search of the internet leads to hundreds of companies that would be glad to take my bucks to produce cards, but who to go with? I'd particularly be interested in someone that could produce low-run (read: practically individual) numbers of each card. Moo sounds really interesting, in that they can produce a pack of 100 cards where every card is a different picture front and back; plus, they look like a really slick, hip company. Now if something like that existed where you could do trading-card sized things, we'd be golden. Any ideas?

posted by NewGear to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (6 answers total)

Well, Moo seems pretty cost competitive for what it is, although the print quality is, as far as I know, a big mystery. Frankly, if the quality is OK and you can handle the card shape, I would consider printing two runs of Moo cards and finding a reliable way to adhere them together.
posted by blueshammer at 8:05 AM on September 20, 2006

(I've printed out a fair number of full-color, two-sided playing cards in my day, and I can tell you that there's no easy way, especially if something like front/back alignment is important. There are other cheap business card services that do full color; I have had success with Overnight Prints, but only for business cards -- they won't guarantee color consistency from one job to the next, and obviously all the cards are the same.)
posted by blueshammer at 8:07 AM on September 20, 2006

It's worth noting that Moo only does Flickr cards. They won't print anything not on your Flickr stream.
posted by dobbs at 9:00 AM on September 20, 2006

I'm definitely gonna give Moo a shot. It might even be neat to have 28mm x 70mm trading cards.
posted by NewGear at 10:38 AM on September 20, 2006

Grab your yellow pages and call the local printing shops in your area. Explain what you want and ask them for a quote. Chances are one of them will cut you a deal.
posted by shanevsevil at 11:30 AM on September 20, 2006

If anyone is still watching this - has anyone ordered and gotten their cards? I ordered on 9/22 and haven't heard crap. I tried to contact them a few days later to see if they were working on it, etc. Nada.
posted by FlamingBore at 11:28 AM on September 28, 2006