These Magic: the Gathering deck boxes are a bit more slap-dash than I would like but, were a hit with the niblings. They are sized to hold up to 100 cards and, cut from walnut, maple and cherry PG ply. Press-fit but, glued for durability. Liner is just a Draftboard sleeve with 4 sides.
I left the masking on for engraving. I found that burnishing the masking down a little extra was helpful to avoid seepage when I did the flood fills. I painted the engraves white, then used a silicone squeegee to flood fill gently with glow acrylic.
After trying several glow-in-the-dark acrylics, I found the stuff from Culture Hustle gave the best results. They sell powders that I mixed with acrylic base in a 1:1 ratio. I flood filled, let it dry, flood filled again, let it dry, then removed the masking. There were a couple spots where it seeped under the masking a bit. I was mostly able to sand that off and, fix the finish later with spray varnish. Once charged up, it gives a really nice bright glow in even just dim light.
Well executed! How deep would you say the engraves are? I love culture hustle’s products and philosophy, but I’ve only ever pulled the trigger on black 3.0… judging by what I see here I may have to try their glow acrylic.
The SD PG engrave seemed adequate from the first test. They felt pretty deep to endure a couple flood fill layers, probably around a millimeter. I’ll try to measure if I do another.
The green CH glow powder is a lot brighter than the blue. They are both much brighter and have more endurance than the (allegedly) top-rated pre-mixed stuff on Amazon. I was considering doing a controlled timelapse to quantify that.
That seems like a good thing to be aware of when designing deck boxes.
These are for three specific children for whom sleeved cards likely won’t be relevant, at least for now. I also sent them 1000 bulk cards (as recommended by someone with more M:tG experience than I have). They are learning to play.
The slop in the width is likely enough for the sleeves. It would be pretty easy to increase the depth if needed to accommodate a sleeved deck.
Some people have made deck boxes using box generators and, that likely works well. I like being able to micromanage my aesthetic preferences and, am doing them “by-hand” in Inkscape. I will likely make another box at some point soon. If it would be helpful, I can make a video walking through it, including the design process.
This would be helpful to me. For some reason, the last couple of times I tried to use boxes.py, the tabs are turning out super, super tiny, even though I haven’t done anything different than I always have when making a box. I’ve basically given up. And videos are greatly beneficial to me, as I’m more of a “see and learn” type person than reading and understanding.
The boxes are wonderful, and that glowing powder is just incredible! I gave up on some of the cheap stuff a long time ago, might have to spring for the good stuff now.
