Playing card stock paper

Arjo Wiggins and Heritage Papers both sell true playing card stock. Be forewarned, it's tough to come by small quantities. Heritage's default order is in tons and Wiggins' default order is in container (semi-truckloads). You can talk them down to smaller orders or you can ask them if they've got resellers who can sell smaller sheet quantities.

In general, the stuff is made "on demand" and only samples are kept in stock.

One approach might be to tell them that you are willing to wait and to have them give you a call the next time somebody is ordering playing card stock. Then see if you can piggy back on that order to get
a smaller quantity of press sheets.

Honestly, the stuff is just expensive. A plain C2S stock will work for you quite well if:

a) the cards are going to be sleeved anyway (as per most CCGs)

b) the cards are only infrequently shuffled and aren't constantly held in your hand (like Talisman, etc.)

black core laminate playing card stock is used to give a little better snap to the cards and to prevent light from shining through as easily. I've only found light to be an issue for cards with little or not art on their faces. It's not impossible to see a Heart through a C2S card if that's all that's on it. It's really hard to see anything useful on a card that has art, small text, and nearly 100% ink coverage. In both cases, though, it's only possible to see something if there's a really bright light behind the cards. Mostly, that's important for high stakes games with cheaters who play in well-lit rooms with little ink coverage on the card faces.

Other than that, you want true playing card stock for it's "memory" (it springs back into shape better) and it's tendency to fray less at the edges if it is shuffled too frequently without sleeves.

Honestly, with card sleeves (for CCGs, etc.) the need for true playing card stock diminishes a lot. A varnished 11 or 12 point C2S will do fine, or an unvarnished 14 point C2S will work in some cases.

There's a really expensive and fairly rare brand of inkjet stock that has a microporous polymer layer that doesn't need laminating. Normally inkjet paper has a gel receptor layer on top. Normally the ink is stored in that layer.

With this microporous polymer coated stock the ink penetrates the fine holes in the paper and is stored in a gel receptor layer UNDER the polymer coat. It's like a self-laminating card stock. Pretty expensive.

I normally find for CCGs at least that all the hype about the central core of playing card stock is just that -- hype. Except for adding spring and some chipping prevention, since most tournament CCG players use card sleeves it doesn't matter how transparent the cards are because the sleeves are generally providing the necessary opacity. So as long as you are printing on even a reasonably thick stock it works.

You've mentioned this inkjet stock a few times. Do you have a brand name or a product number? It sounds too pricey for regular prototyping, but for a "finished product" it might be worth the investment.

Thanks for any info,

Jeff

The only use we think that exists in gaming is for prototyping stuff for venture capital hunting. It is so crazy expensive that when we ran it through our print on demand model for CCGs we went bankrupt on paper almost instantly. It is currently made in any quantity by I think only one company in the world. It just wasn't suitable for any continuous production model.

And it's only coated on one side. Since it wasn't coated on two sides you'd be stuck with some way to glue or center laminate two pieces of it together.

A laboratory has manufactured some 2-sided versions of this stuff to see if it was possible. It was. But since almost nobody orders it, you'd probably literally have to order it by the ton to get the 2-sided stuff.

If you are still serious interested in ordering a lot of it, let me know. I'll see how much I can get a few boxes of the stuff for, and I'll try to see if I can get a sample or two (one to send to you, and one to test). We've never used the stuff ourselves, just heard about it from folks who specialize in stocks and inks and who read the industry tech journals.