How to Add New Card Images

Creating Card Art Images

Regardless of the program used to make any editing a card scan may require (cropping, border removal, color correction, shadow/highlight balance, etc.); any edited card scan should be reduced to 288x232 with a JPEG quality of '91' using XnView. http://www.xnview.com/

This is purely to maintain the quality consistency of the images in the CardArtxxx folders, whilst keeping the jpg files to a reasonable size. Although for most card scans XnView can provide a complete solution to editing and converting the card images.

The following parameters can be cut and pasted into a text editor and saved as an XnView .xbs script file to aid the conversion setup.

clean( 95 )
resize( 0 lanczos 288 232 0 0 0 )
settings( 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 )
output( jpeg 91 0 1 0 0 0 0 )


(The author of these guidelines has no affiliation to XnView whatsoever… apart from it being an excellent free program.) :)

Its worth pointing out that using an original cropped image much smaller than 288x232 to start with can result in visible compression artifacts when converted and viewed within the game. This makes card scans available from many of the MTG Card Collector/List web sites too small to produce reasonable quality crops for use within the game. These sites are excellent for researching any available alternative artwork for the cards – giving details of which sets any particular card was included in – but the best resource for suitable HQ card scans is our own CCGHQ Picture Forum. Please consider this when searching for original card scans to produce suitable crops to include in the game.

Card Art File Naming / Personalising the CardArt Folders

When the current CardArtxxx folders were first produced, any available alternative artwork for a card was collated from the earliest WotC MTG published artwork to the latest – this means the earliest released artwork has been set as the default image displayed in the Deck Builder. However, it is possible to manually rename the jpg image files so you can personalize which of the alternative artwork acts as the default image.

The card image jpg files are named using a 4 digit ID Number, followed by a letter to signify it as one of a number of alternative artwork files available to a card. The default image is identified by not having the letter after the ID Number.

The individual ID Numbers for the cards can be checked by opening the relevant Manalink.csv file using a text editor – ‘Manalink.csv’ for the Constructed game and ‘ManalinkL.csv’ for the Limited game.

(Please Note: It may not always be the case that individual cards included in both the Constructed and Limited games have the same ID Number – please check both csv files before altering the jpg file names for these cards.)

The cards ID Numbers are identified as the first number in its csv file entry. For example: in both csv files the beginning of the entry for the Bog Wraith card reads:

24;Bog Wraith;1;Bog Wrai...

Checking each CardArt folder shows the Bog Wraith card (ID Number: 24) has 4 available images. The default image: 0024.jpg – and 3 alternative images: 0024A.jpg, 0024B.jpg and 0024C.jpg.

If you view each image and decide you would prefer the Bog Wraith card to use the 0024B.jpg file to act as the default image in the Deck Builder, simply swap the names of the 0024.jpg and 0024B.jpg files.

1. First rename the default 0024.jpg file to ‘0024x.jpg’ (this prevents any naming conflicts whilst the file names are being altered)
2. Then rename the 0024B.jpg file to ‘0024.jpg’
3. Return to the 0024x.jpg file and rename it to ‘0024B.jpg’

It is important when renaming the jpg files that you preserve the 4 digits of the ID Number and the correct sequence of letters representing the total number of alternative images. If you don’t follow this naming convention in some cases during games, where the images are randomly selected when playing, you may find a card will sometimes display no artwork.

Please keep backup copies of all jpg files you modify, as any later CardArt folder updates will overwrite your customized file names, which will then require you copying your personalized artwork into the new folder. Remember though; the game updates will replace individual cards from time to time, so please check your personalized artwork is still current before copying it into any newly downloaded CardArt folder.