Types of MTG Proxy Decks: Why Hybrid Decks Are Best
Not all proxy decks are the same. The word "proxy" covers everything from a marker-scrawled basic land to a high-quality custom play piece inspired by cards most players could never afford to shuffle — and the differences matter, both for how your games feel and for what your choices mean for the wider hobby.
This guide does two things. First, it lays out the three main ways people actually build proxy decks, fairly and without judgement. Second, it explains why we believe one of them — the high-quality hybrid deck — is the healthiest approach for players, for collectors, and even for the game's publisher. Along the way we will take on some of the common worries about what proxies "do" to Magic, because most of them do not survive a close look.
The Three Types of Proxy Deck
Broadly, every proxy deck falls into one of three categories. None of them is wrong — they simply serve different players and different goals.
1. The All-Proxy Budget Deck
This is the entry point for most people. Every card in the deck is a proxy, usually a cheap one, and the goal is simple: play a powerful deck for a fraction of what the real cards would cost. A brand-new player who wants to try Commander without spending hundreds of euros, or a group of friends who all want fully-powered decks for a kitchen-table pod, are exactly the people this serves.
The strength of the all-proxy deck is access. It lets someone experience formats and strategies that would otherwise be locked behind an enormous price tag. The trade-off is that it sits entirely outside the official ecosystem — nothing about it connects back to the game or its market.
2. The Home-Printed Deck
Some players print their own proxies at home — inkjet printouts, cut-and-sleeved over basic lands, or similar do-it-yourself methods. This is the cheapest option of all and it is genuinely useful for playtesting: trying a decklist before committing to it, or theory-crafting a build you are not sure about.
The honest limitation is quality. Home prints rarely match the look and feel of a real card, they stand out at the table, and a deck made entirely of them can feel more like a proof of concept than a finished deck. For testing, that is fine. For a deck you want to be proud of and play for years, most people want something better.
3. The Hybrid Deck
The hybrid deck is the one we build our whole approach around, and it works like this: the bulk of the deck stays original, and only the expensive cards are replaced with high-quality proxies.
In a typical 100-card Commander deck, something like seventy of those cards are worth under two euros each — the commons, the uncommons, the format staples that were never expensive in the first place. You buy those as real cards. Then, for the handful of cards that carry a three-figure price tag, you use a high-quality proxy instead — either because of what the card does, or because of the exclusive art you want to play with.
Because the proxies are high quality, they sit alongside the real cards in sleeves without breaking the visual experience of the deck. The important part is transparency: your table should know you are using proxies, and once everyone is comfortable with that, the actual play experience feels smooth, clean, and finished.
Why the Hybrid Model Is the Healthiest Choice
The case for hybrid decks is not just about saving money. It is about how proxies, collecting, and the official game can all coexist — and even support each other — when you strike the balance the right way.
The €300 Price Tag Is Not Wizards' Price
Start with the most common misunderstanding. When a card sells for one, two, or three hundred euros, that price is not set by Wizards of the Coast. They do not sell that card to anyone at that price. That number is set by the secondary market — resellers, speculators, and supply and demand on a card that may be years or decades out of print.
Wizards makes its direct revenue from official product: booster packs, collector boosters, precons, Secret Lair drops, and other sealed Magic releases. The three-hundred-euro price on a reserved-list dual land or an out-of-print staple is money that flows through the resale market, not a price Wizards is charging you at checkout. Proxying that one card does not remove a direct sale Wizards was currently offering to make.
Playing and Collecting Are Two Different Things
Here is the part that resolves most of the tension. A three-hundred-euro card and a deck you actually play are not the same object serving the same purpose.
Many players hesitate to sleeve up a genuine three-hundred-euro card and shuffle it every week. The risk of damage — bends, scratches, drink spills — changes the way you treat the card. At that price, the card starts behaving less like a normal game piece and more like a collectible.
The collectible and the playing card are two separate things. The hybrid model simply acknowledges that: keep collecting as collecting, and let playing be playing, with a proxy standing in for the expensive card at the table where it would otherwise never be used anyway.
The Hybrid Deck Keeps You Connected to the Real Market
This is the argument that sets the hybrid model apart from the all-proxy and home-printed approaches, and it is the heart of why we believe in it.
When seventy of your hundred cards are real cards bought from other players and shops, you are feeding the second-hand market. That market is part of what keeps people opening booster packs in the first place: the singles that come out of those packs have a place to go, a value, a reason to exist. Buying bulk and staples as real cards keeps you plugged into that cycle. You are still participating in the game's economy.
Contrast that with the alternative. If someone builds ten decks and prints every single card at home — never buying a pack, never buying an original card, never touching the second-hand market — they have fully disconnected from the game as a business. There is nothing wrong with that person enjoying Magic on their own terms, but it does nothing to support the game they love.
The hybrid model links the two worlds. You support the official game and its market through the bulk of your deck, and you use high-quality proxies only for the specific expensive cards where buying the original would mean either enormous cost or locking away a collectible you would never risk playing. What you step away from is not Wizards — it is the abusive end of the resale market, the part where a single piece of cardboard costs more than a games console.
Two Hundred Copies of the Mona Lisa
Now to the worry that comes up most often: the idea that proxies somehow cheapen the game, or that if reproductions exist, the "real" thing loses its meaning. It is worth taking seriously, because the opposite is true.
There are countless reproductions of the Mona Lisa. Prints, posters, postcards, images in every textbook. Not one of them has made the original in the Louvre less valuable — if anything, the reproductions are why the painting is one of the most famous works of art on Earth. Access and iconic status feed each other. The reproductions did not diminish the original; they made it a part of the culture.
Magic's most beautiful cards work the same way. Some of the game's most stunning art lives on cards worth hundreds, thousands, even five thousand euros. For the vast majority of players, those cards effectively do not exist — you will only ever see them as a photo on the internet, if you see them at all. They might as well be imaginary.
High-quality proxies change the practical experience for casual players. They let people enjoy iconic card designs and memorable game pieces at the table, in a real game, instead of only seeing them as images online or locked away in collections.
And it makes the games themselves better. There is a real thrill in casting a powerful spell that also happens to look spectacular. Dropping a card that is both game-changing and beautiful adds a little epic feeling to the moment that a plain, functional printing simply does not. It motivates people. It makes the match feel special. Playing with art you love is one of the quiet joys of the hobby, and high-quality proxies open that joy up to everyone, not just the few who can afford a five-thousand-euro original.
A Cautionary Tale: What Reselling Is Doing to Pokémon
If you want to see where an unchecked secondary market leads, look at what has happened to the Pokémon Trading Card Game over the last couple of years.
Demand exploded, and resellers moved in hard — buying up product the moment it hit shelves, purely to relist it at inflated prices. New sets began selling out within minutes, with buyers stuck in hours-long queues while scalpers listed their pre-orders online at a markup. It got bad enough that the manufacturers themselves had to speak out: The Pokémon Company and Nintendo publicly acknowledged the problem and rolled out purchase limits, ID verification, and anti-bot measures specifically to get product into players' hands rather than resellers'.
Here is the uncomfortable part. From a pure sales standpoint, the shortage was fantastic for the manufacturer — they printed billions of cards and sold every single one, often instantly. On paper, that is a dream. But the actual experience for players and genuine collectors got steadily worse: empty shelves, cards you could only ever see as a photo online, and a growing number of long-time fans simply walking away from the hobby out of frustration.
That is the real lesson. A booming resale market can look healthy from the outside while it quietly erodes the thing that actually keeps a game alive: people being able to get the cards, play with them, and enjoy them. A publisher can sell out every print run and still be watching its own community's experience get worse. In the long run, that kind of secondary-market pressure does not strengthen a game — it slowly kills it.
High-quality proxies are one of the pressure-release valves for exactly this problem. When the card you want to play with is available as a proxy, the frenzy to own the original at any price loses some of its grip. Collectors can still collect; the resale market can still exist. But players are no longer held hostage by it — and that is healthier for everyone who actually wants to sit down and play the game.
Where We Fit In
This is exactly the kind of proxy we make. Our cards are built to the high-quality standard the hybrid model depends on — good enough to sit in a deck next to your real cards without drawing a second glance, and faithful enough to the art that playing with them feels like playing with the real thing.
We are not here to help anyone replace their entire collection or cut themselves off from the game. We are here for the player who wants to keep buying and trading real cards for the bulk of their decks, and who wants a smart, seamless way to include the expensive pieces — the format-defining staples and the breathtaking art — without paying secondary-market prices or risking a genuine collectible at the table.
Our Position on Responsible Proxy Use
We want to be very clear about this: EncoreH Cards does not support, encourage, or tolerate the use of proxy cards to deceive anyone.
Our cards are intended for casual play, deck testing, collection, display, and other personal recreational uses. They are not original trading cards, they are not intended for sanctioned events, and they should never be advertised, traded, submitted for authentication, resold, or represented as genuine cards.
If one of our cards is ever transferred to another person, its proxy nature must be clearly disclosed. Transparency is the foundation of responsible proxy use: your playgroup, buyer, store, marketplace, or any other third party should never be misled about what the card is.
This is not just a preference — it is part of our store policy. You can read our full position in our Terms of Service.
If that is the kind of deck you want to build, browse our full catalogue or drop your decklist into our decklist search tool to find the exact cards worth proxying in your build.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a hybrid proxy deck?
A hybrid deck is one where most of the cards are real — typically the inexpensive bulk and staples — and only the expensive cards are replaced with high-quality proxies. It keeps you connected to the official game and the second-hand market while saving you from paying secondary-market prices for a handful of costly cards.
Do proxies take money away from Wizards of the Coast?
Not in the way people assume. Wizards earns money from sealed product like booster packs and precons, not from the secondary market. The high prices on out-of-print or reserved-list cards are set by resellers, so proxying those specific cards does not remove a sale Wizards was ever going to make. The hybrid model actually keeps you buying real product and singles for most of your deck.
Are proxies bad for the collectibility of rare cards?
No. A genuine expensive card is a collectible, and its value comes from being an original — which a proxy does not change, just as prints of a famous painting do not lower the value of the original. Expensive cards are collected and preserved; proxies are played. The two roles do not compete.
Why not just print proxies at home?
Home printing is great for playtesting, but the quality rarely matches a real card, and home-printed cards stand out at the table. High-quality proxies are made to blend seamlessly with real cards, so your deck looks and plays like a finished deck rather than a proof of concept.
Isn't an all-proxy deck cheaper than a hybrid one?
Slightly, but the hybrid model is not really about squeezing out the last euro. It is about building a deck that looks and feels great, keeps you part of the game's real economy, and only proxies the cards where it genuinely makes sense — the very expensive staples and the exclusive art. For most players that balance is well worth it.
How do proxies help with problems like the Pokémon card shortages?
A large part of what drives shortages and sky-high prices is people chasing cards to own them at any cost, which resellers exploit. When the card you actually want to play with is available as a high-quality proxy, that pressure eases: collectors can still collect the originals, and the resale market still exists, but players are no longer forced to compete with speculators just to build a deck. Proxies separate the act of playing from the act of speculating, which is healthier for the game as a whole.
Do you support using proxies as fake original cards?
No. EncoreH Cards does not support using proxies to deceive players, collectors, stores, marketplaces, tournament organisers, or authentication services. Our cards are intended for honest casual use, testing, collection, and display. If a proxy is transferred to another person, its unofficial nature must be clearly disclosed.
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