Proxy Printer Guide

Ink tank printers are ideal for printing proxies because they offer extremely low cost per print. When printing whole decks or cubes, you'll be producing a large number of cards, and ink tank systems let you print hundreds or thousands of pages before needing a refill—saving you money compared to traditional cartridge printers.

This guide focuses on printers that excel at producing high-quality, vibrant proxies for tabletop games. While office and laser printers are great for text and business documents, they often lack the color accuracy, photo quality, and media versatility needed for the best proxy cards.

You can, but for the best results, use heavyweight matte or glossy photo paper. This gives proxies a more authentic feel and better color reproduction, making them look and handle more like real cards.

Use high-resolution images, set your printer to its highest quality/photo mode, and select the correct paper type in your printer settings. Clean your print heads regularly for consistent results.

While professional photo printers like the Epson SureColor series offer exceptional image quality, they come with very high ink costs—especially when printing in volume, as you would for proxies. Additionally, these printers are often optimized for photo paper and may not handle heavier cardstock as reliably as the ink tank models recommended here.

Pigment-based black inks are great for matte paper and any paper that specifically supports pigment inks. However, when printing on glossy paper (or when you set your media type to glossy in printer settings), printers with pigment black will combine colors to create black instead of using the dedicated black ink. This results in less crisp, less deep blacks compared to dye-based black inks, which work well on both matte and glossy surfaces.