proxy-printer

name	proxy-printer
description	Render printable PDF proxies for an MTG deck — one PDF for the deck's cards, one for every token kind those cards produce. Cards and tokens both use a layout that mirrors a real MTG card frame (name banner / ASCII art / type banner / oracle text / P/T) with all data pulled live from Scryfall.
compatibility	Requires Python 3.12+, uv, and reportlab. Shares mtg_utils package via symlink.
license	0BSD

Proxy Printer

Turn a parsed MTG deck list into printable proxy PDFs. The skill emits two artifacts: cards.pdf (one proxy per copy of every card in the deck) and tokens.pdf (one proxy per distinct token kind produced by any card in the deck, deduped by Scryfall oracle_id). Both use the same render template: name banner, ASCII art keyed by card subtype, type banner, oracle text, P/T.

The skill is callable standalone (the user gives a list, the agent prints PDFs) or by another wizard — deck-wizard and cube-wizard both produce the parsed-deck JSON schema this skill consumes.

The Iron Rule

NEVER render a proxy from training-data oracle text. Every name, mana cost, type line, oracle text, P/T, and token-side stat on a generated PDF MUST come from a Scryfall lookup performed by proxy-print. The CLI is the authoritative renderer; the agent is not allowed to "fix up" any printed content.

When to use this skill

• The user gives a deck list and asks for printable proxies.
• The user gives a TCGPlayer order CSV / Moxfield txt / plain card list and wants to physically print the cards.
• A higher-level skill (deck-wizard, cube-wizard) wants to ship a printable artifact at the end of a build session.

Workflow

[raw deck list]  →  parse-deck  →  deck.json  →  proxy-print --kind cards   →  cards.pdf
                                              \→ proxy-print --kind tokens  →  tokens.pdf

Step 1 — Parse the input

If the user supplies anything other than a parsed deck JSON, run parse-deck first to produce the canonical schema. parse-deck already handles Moxfield, MTGO, plain text, and CSV (including the TCGPlayer-order-CSV shape).

parse-deck input.txt > /tmp/deck.json

Step 2 — Refresh bulk data if needed

proxy-print reads from the Scryfall bulk JSON. If the cached file is older than 7 days the CLI exits with code 1 and a message pointing here. Run:

download-bulk --output-dir /tmp/scryfall-bulk

One-time-ish: if you want artist-credited art on the proxies, populate the attributed catalog first (fetch-art --from-deck deck.json is usually right; ~15s vs ~108s for the full sweep). See ASCII art catalog below.

Step 3 — Render cards

proxy-print --kind cards \
    --deck /tmp/deck.json \
    --bulk-data /tmp/scryfall-bulk/default-cards.json \
    --out /tmp/cards.pdf

Step 4 — Render tokens

proxy-print --kind tokens \
    --deck /tmp/deck.json \
    --bulk-data /tmp/scryfall-bulk/default-cards.json \
    --out /tmp/tokens.pdf

The two render passes are intentionally separate so the user can re-print just one half if a deck change only affects cards (or only the token list).

CLI reference

proxy-print --kind {cards,tokens} --deck DECK.json --out OUT.pdf [options]

Flag	Required	Default	Notes
--kind	yes	—	cards or tokens
--deck PATH	yes	—	parsed deck JSON
--out PATH	yes	—	output PDF path
--bulk-data PATH	no	auto	Scryfall bulk JSON; auto-resolves the cached default
--page-size letter|a4	no	letter	page size
--copies N	no	1	extra copies of every card / token
--include-sideboard	no	on	cards mode; flip with --no-sideboard
--no-sideboard	no	off	cards mode
--report-art-coverage	no	off	tokens mode; emits per-token JSON to stderr

Exit codes: 0 ok, 1 bulk missing/stale, 2 deck JSON invalid, 3 output unwritable, 4 rendering error.

Layout

Cards and tokens share one render template; the proportions adapt based on how much oracle text the card has.

┌───────────────────────────────┐
│ ╔══════════════════════════╗  │  name banner
│ ║ NAME              {COST} ║  │  (cost omitted for tokens)
├─╚══════════════════════════╝──┤
│         (ASCII art)           │  art region (proportional)
├───────────────────────────────┤
│ ╔══════════════════════════╗  │  type banner
│ ║ Type — Subtype       {C} ║  │
├─╚══════════════════════════╝──┤
│ oracle text                   │  oracle region (proportional)
│                       ┌─────┐ │
│                       │ P/T │ │
└───────────────────────┴─────┴─┘

Card geometry: 2.5″ × 3.5″. Grid: 3 × 3 = 9 per page on Letter or A4.

ASCII art catalog

Art comes from two tiers, with the attributed catalog layered on top of a hand-curated local catalog:

• Local catalog — ships in the repo at mtg-utils/src/mtg_utils/data/card_art/. One .txt per card subtype (creature / artifact / enchantment / land subtypes) plus card-type fallbacks (creature.txt, artifact.txt, enchantment.txt, land.txt, sorcery.txt, instant.txt, planeswalker.txt) and an ultimate _generic.txt. Hand-curated ASCII, no attribution carried.
• Attributed catalog — user-populated cache at $MTG_SKILLS_CACHE_DIR/attributed-art/ (default ~/.cache/mtg-skills/attributed-art/). Files carry a 3-line header noting title, source, and license. When art comes from here the proxy renders art by <Name> in the lower-left footer, on the same row as P/T (where real MTG cards put the artist credit).

Lookup chain

For each card, lookup walks slugs in order — subtypes first, then card-types, then _generic. For each slug it tries the attributed catalog first, then the local catalog. First hit wins:

1. Parse type_line. For each subtype after —, in order (Vampire Knight → vampire, then knight):
   • try attributed/<sub>.txt
   • try local/<sub>.txt
2. If no subtype matched, walk card-type words (skipping meta words like Token / Legendary / Snow / Tribal / Basic). For each card-type:
   • try attributed/<card-type>.txt
   • try local/<card-type>.txt
3. Final fallback: local/_generic.txt.

This per-slug interleaving (instead of attributed-tier-then-local-tier) means a hand-curated local Vampire beats a generic attributed Creature, which is usually what you want. See docs/adr/0006-attributed-art-catalog.md.

Art is P/T-independent by design — every Soldier token shares soldier.txt; the P/T appears as text in the proxy.

Populating the attributed catalog (one-time-ish)

The attributed catalog ships empty. Populate it with fetch-art, which pulls every MTG subtype from Scryfall's catalog endpoints, mines two ASCII-art sources for candidates (asciiart.eu category pages and Christopher Johnson's collection at asciiart.website, ~1148 tags auto-discovered from its browse.php?show=tags — tags map directly to MTG concepts where categories conflated them with franchise art), scores by target 20×10 (hard cap 30×18), and writes attributed .txt files with the 3-line license header that proxy-print knows how to read. Each file's header points at the per-source attribution terms; asciiart.website headers honestly note "personal-use proxy" rather than asserting a license the site doesn't grant.

For the per-deck workflow (recommended for routine proxy printing), narrow the fetch to subtypes the deck actually uses (plus the subtypes of every token the deck generates via Scryfall's all_parts):

fetch-art --from-deck /tmp/deck.json

A typical Commander deck has ~30 unique subtypes → ~30 tag fetches at ~0.4s each (~15s cold-fetch, near-instant with the 7-day cache). The full sweep (no --from-deck) takes ~108s cold and is only worth running if you intend to print proxies for many different decks.

Add --by-name to also fetch art for individual card names — these power the differentiation pass in proxy-print (so multiple distinct-name cards sharing one subtype's art each get their own piece when one is available):

fetch-art --from-deck /tmp/deck.json --by-name

The name-keyed pass tries two sources in order:

1. asciiart.eu full-name search (/search?q=<full name>). Matches across full art titles, so multi-word MTG names usually land — Lightning Bolt → lightning ASCII, Black Lotus → lotus, Sword of Truth and Justice → sword.
2. asciiart.website per-word fallback when (1) returns nothing. The site's search matches tag names rather than titles, so we split the card name and try each word (≥4 chars) on its API (CSRF + form POST under the hood). e.g., "Brain Maggot" → "Brain" → a brain piece; "Llanowar Elves" → "Elves" → an elf piece (when one fits the 30×18 budget).

Cards whose name doesn't yield any in-budget hit fall back to type-keyed art at render time.

fetch-art

HTTP responses are cached on disk for 7 days under $MTG_SKILLS_CACHE_DIR/ascii-art-fetcher/, so re-running is cheap. Add --report-missing to see every subtype that had no fitting candidate — those fall through to the local catalog at render time.

Subtypes that are MTG-only mechanics or set / plane names (Treasure, Saga, Innistrad, etc.) are deliberately skipped; the local catalog handles them.

Hand-curating unique art when the differentiation pass can't find any

The differentiation pass tries name-keyed lookup for cards in the same type-keyed group, but it can only swap in art the catalog actually has. For MTG-specific concept names like Mana Confluence or Temple of Malady, asciiart.eu and asciiart.website usually don't have anything in budget. When that happens, proxy-print emits

WARN: 3 cards share land.txt (Mana Confluence, Temple of Abandon, Temple of Malady). Consider hand-curating name-keyed art.

When you see this warning, offer to hand-draw placeholder art for the named cards. You're filling a catalog gap. Procedure:

1. Read 2-3 style references from mtg-utils/src/mtg_utils/data/card_art/*.txt — pick files whose subjects relate to each card's theme (e.g. for a temple-themed land, look at temple.txt, monument.txt, or other architectural pieces). These show the size budget, ASCII vocabulary, and aesthetic of the existing collection.
2. Draw a small ASCII piece per card, ≤30 chars wide × ≤18 lines tall. The same size budget as the fetcher uses; the renderer auto-scales font to fit the fixed art region. Stay visual — depict the thing with shapes and lines, not letters substituting for shapes (the feedback_ascii_art_no_labels.md memory entry).
3. Write each file to $MTG_SKILLS_CACHE_DIR/attributed-art/<name-slug>.txt (default ~/.cache/mtg-skills/attributed-art/<name-slug>.txt) with the three-line attributed-art header:

   # <Title> (hand-drawn for proxy run)
   # Source: hand-drawn ASCII
   # Personal-use proxy
   <blank line>
   <art body>
   

   The renderer picks up (name-slug).txt via lookup_art_by_name, tags the resolution as tier="name", and renders the credit (from the (by <name>) parenthetical) in the footer slot. For hand-drawn pieces the header can omit (by …); the credit just stays blank.
4. Re-run proxy-print — same command, no flags changed. The differentiation pass picks up the new files automatically; no re-fetch needed.

This is the last-resort path. The fast path is fetch-art --from-deck deck.json --by-name; hand-curation only fills the cards the search couldn't.

Footer slot

The lower-left strip under the type banner is reserved for the artist credit (art by <Name>) when attributed art is available. Tokens do not render a from: <source> line — players know which spell created a token because they just cast it, and the deck list carries the same info; ceding the slot to the artist credit gives tokens the same lower-left attribution real MTG cards have.

The in-art signature (the artist's initials embedded inside the ASCII itself) is preserved verbatim during fetch and already satisfies asciiart.eu's FAQ attribution requirement independently of the footer.

Type-banner position

For non-token cards, the type banner's bottom edge is pinned at y + CARD_H / 3 — a fixed position 1/3 from the card bottom, matching where real MTG cards put the type line. The art region is the same height across cards (~128 pt, enough for 14-line art up to ~9 pt); oracle text fills everything below the banner. Short oracle text leaves whitespace below itself rather than the banner shifting (also matches real MTG cards).

Tokens keep the legacy dynamic layout — they rarely have oracle text, so the banner-near-the-bottom-just-above-P/T look reads closer to a real MTG token frame.

Interpreting WARN: output

proxy-print writes warnings to stderr but exits 0. Two patterns to recognize:

• WARN: missing from bulk: <name> — Scryfall's cached bulk doesn't know this card. Most common cause: a flavor name like "Paradise Chocobo" (which is the FIC printing of "Birds of Paradise"). The user should check the source list and fix the name, or refresh bulk data if it's a brand-new set.
• WARN: token id <id> from <source> — a card's all_parts references a token id not in the local bulk. Should be rare; safe to ignore.

Don't escalate either case automatically. Tell the user which cards were skipped and continue.

Common pitfalls

• Don't paraphrase oracle text. If the rendered PDF has truncated oracle text, fix the layout (the renderer auto-shrinks font from 9.5pt down to 6.5pt) — don't edit the text content.
• Don't add tokens manually. If a card "should" make a token but doesn't show up in the rendered tokens.pdf, that's because Scryfall's all_parts doesn't link it. Custom / homebrew tokens are out of scope.
• Don't run download-bulk reflexively. It downloads ~500MB. Only refresh when proxy-print exits with code 1 telling you to.
• Don't merge the two PDFs. They're separate by design — tokens stay off to the side during play, cards go in the deck. The user almost always wants to print or replace them independently.

Limitations

• Custom / homebrew tokens not in Scryfall are skipped silently.
• Image-based proxies (Scryfall art) are not supported in v1.
• Cut guides / crop marks are not drawn.
• Double-faced card backs are not rendered (only the front face appears on the proxy; both faces' oracle text is concatenated).
• Symbol-font mana cost rendering is out of scope; mana costs use the Scryfall-brace form (e.g. {2}{B}{R}).

Cross-skill use

• deck-wizard can shell out to proxy-print after a tuning session to ship a printable artifact alongside the deck JSON.
• cube-wizard consumes parsed cube JSON, which is shape-compatible with parsed deck JSON for proxy-print's purposes (commanders + cards lists, no sideboard).
• lgs-search is independent — proxies are for print-at-home, not sourcing.