How to alter an mtg card
How to alter a Magic: the Gathering card
- Materials
- a Magic: the Gathering card of your choice
- acrylic paints. See below document for more info on paints.
- a wet palette (DIY from wet paper kitchen towel/sponge in a tray with wax paper on top)
- water mug + paper kitchen towel (no fabric rag: it can leave lint stuck in your paint)
- brushes: filbert (size 3-5) and fine point (size 1 or smaller for the finest details)
Miniature painting brushes (ex. Citadel) are a good resource, but you can cut off bristles from a brush to slim it down as well.
- a wooden toothpick
- optional: a spare mtg card (tester), pencils, an mtg card-sized print of the image you want to paint, masking fluid/painter’s tape, fineliner (size 2 and lower), inks, sealant/varnish, piece of paper to avoid smudging the surface below your mtg card, … - Setup
- a stable place with good light that’s clean, and dust/wind free
- keep your reference handy
- don’t wear clothes or accessories that shed lint/dust easily (can stick to your paint)
- wash hands before starting - Painting
If you are new to altering, I heavily recommend testing out swatches and techniques on a spare mtg card to get a feel for it.
To start, coat your card in a base layer with a neutral color (grey, pastel blue) of acrylic paint, using a filbert brush.
Paint over the bits that need to be covered, then either freehand or trace your new image over the base layer.
The below guide explains how you can carbon copy your art onto the card.
https://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/community-forums/creativity/artwork/340375-how-to-alter-for-fun-and-profit
Your paint shouldn’t be too watery (it will pearl up), nor should it be too thick (it will leave thick streaks on the card). Most alter artists describe the consistency of their paints as “similar to milk”.
Careful when using pencils directly on the base layer: it is very thin and will easily scratch, flaking off the paint when you draw on it. I recommend using a fineliner or brush instead. Don’t use a ballpoint: it can dent the card if you push it too hard.
Note: careful when using an older mtg card. Their surface can be scratched or otherwise damaged, which can lead to swelling if it absorbs the water in your paint.
Use as dry as possible paint to cover it, making sure the least possible moisture can get into the card. Ensure there is a thick enough base layer on your card that is fully dried before you start layering on more paint.
Moisture can cause warping, swelling, and have your brush rub off the top layer of your card, which you absolutely want to avoid. A new mtg card will be fairly water resistant, but you should still treat it carefully.
It’s a good idea to check your card under a bright light for damage, before you begin painting!
Example of worn cards:
Once you’ve got the base layer and your outline ready, start building up your painting. Do the full background first, where possible, then paint the objects that are closer to the viewer.
When you are finished, you can clean up the edges with a soaked toothpick. A wet toothpick is softer and can be gently rubbed into the card to remove bits of paint. Rub the flecks of paint away from the center of the card, not over it, as they still can be sticky and adhere to your card otherwise. Avoid using the toothpick multiple times, as even wet, it still scratches into your card’s surface and will rub through it if you use it too much. Use it in the very last step, when cleaning up your final work.
You can use painter’s tape or liquid masking film to protect parts of your art, but I’d personally advise against it. Paint can build up against the ridges, so when you pull off the tape or film, you can pull off paint and/or have raised edges of paint. Ideally, you want an as flat as possible end result. If you use a masking medium, be careful when you remove it. It’s rare, but it can happen that it sticks to your card and tears it when you pull it off.
You can varnish your card with a spray, or paint on a protective transparent layer. Don’t spray in humid weather, as the sealant can turn sticky and rough. My recommended brand is the Winsor & Newton satin varnish.
A couple of tutorials with visuals:
https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/1s2emf/how_to_alter_a_mtg_card_like_a_pro/
(be sure to read the comments in the thread as well, as they’ve got tons of tips!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm39cK6a1DM
(Example from start to finish of a simple paintover tutorial)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAMOxr6k2a0
(5 tips for making a better alter + examples)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmUSVj2quo8&list=PLG3iPThNRP0Bk8LZ7__vOe--ii2rROlXq&index=3
(list of different altering videos)
General tips
A couple of tips:
- you can dab the still wet paint with your fingertips for making the color more diluted, to add some texture, or to flatten it and make it dry faster (careful of dirt on your fingers!)
- making gradients is very difficult with acrylic paint, because it dries so fast.
Wet on wet can be done but it requires practice and a good brush. It’s safer to mix your gradients and go in layers. Light washes over a pale background work, too.
Another technique is wetting your brush slightly, then pick up paint with it, then paint with your brush flat against the alter. The color will be more intense closer to the tip, but become paler and more water the further away from it.
- Some colors, such as yellow tones, tend to be more transparent than other colors.
Instead of painstakingly layering on transparent colors, use a pale background and paint your translucent colors on top of that. Mixing your paints with white can also make them less translucent.
- If small pieces of dust or dirt stick to your tiny canvas, you can remove these with either a dry, sturdy brush, or a soaked toothpick/satay stick. Rub the tip of the soaked stick very gently back and forth over the piece until it lets loose. Don’t force it, repeat the action until it lets loose.
- Old brushes can be used to add painted textures to your alters. Don’t discard them when they are split or frizzed, they still can have some use!
- If you want to add an effect such as a glow or a nebula, try dry brushing in a color slightly lighter than your background. Never go for the biggest contrast first. You can mix a color on your wet palette, then mix parts of it to make lighter hues of the same color.
- Be careful not to abundantly touch the surface of your card/paint with your fingers. Sweat and grease can stick to the card, making its surface slicker and more prone to repel paint. You can clean it by dabbing it with a kneaded eraser or gently rubbing it with a clean piece of paper kitchen towel.
- Painting this small can be very taxing on your hand and body. Stretch often and don’t forget to take a couple of breaks! Take a sip from your non-paint water!
- When doing a border extension (expanding the original art on the card), keep in mind that color matching of lighter colors is significantly harder than darker colors. Keep an eye on continuity and textures, as it will make for a better end result.
- Try to avoid using pure white or pure black when adding shadows or highlights. Instead, mix the white with another color for highlights, or add yellow to your midtones. For darks, try to use brown or blue. Brown (burnt umber) and blue together are often the perfect colors for shadows!
- Be patient. As with all art, you will get a better result when you really put in those extra few minutes and make your end result clean and vibrant. Because your art is so concentrated on a tiny surface, polishing it can really make a difference!
Acrylic paints
There are several brands of acrylic paint out there that you can use for altering.
Most people start with a cheap (dollar store) brand of acrylics, and this is fine. It’s testing out whether altering is something for you or not, so you don’t have to spend much that way.
If you want specific brand recommendations however, there are a couple of quality brands out there.
My personal favorite is Golden Fluids acrylics, which is a highly pigmented professional acrylics brand. They dry very thin and with vibrant colors, and have a medium glossy finish.
You can buy a starter set or loose paints, depending on your preference.
I started out with Titanium White, Carbon Black, Cadmium Red, Primary Yellow, Yellow Ochre, Burnt Umber Light, Cerulean Blue Deep, and Primary Cyan.
Apart from the Titanium White, my original jars that I bought a decade ago still contain paint.
You need very little of it to gain the colors you want, and in the end, it saves you a lot of time.
More info on Golden Fluids here:
https://goldenartistcolors.com/products/golden-artist-acrylics/fluid
Another brand that is frequently used that is readily available is Citadel COLOUR.
These are miniature paints, designed for use on Warhammer figurines, but you can use them just as well for altering. They have a medium glossy finish.
They have very good coverage, come in a wide array of colors (which are named after specific colors in the Warhamer universe!), and are pretty easy to mix.
One downside imo is the lid: you can’t squirt out the paint but have to scoop it out instead, which takes a bit longer. Their metallics are excellent.
Pay attention to exactly what kind of paint you are buying: the brand sells washes, textured paints, as well as contrast paints, which are much intenser in pigment when pooled up.
While these are handy for figurines, they’re not designed for work on flat surfaces.
Another brand is Vallejo Game Color.
This, too, is a brand that’s designed for miniature painting, and it has excellent coverage and dries beautifully evenly, although mixing it can be tougher.
Dried colors can look a bit more different from wet colors, so definitely make swatches.
They have a fairly glossy finish, more so than the previous two brands. This makes them great for painting objects like cars, planes, etc. as it will have a shinier finish.
It is imo less good than Golden Fluids and Citadel for altering, but still more pigmented and better quality than most acrylics out there.
I have not tested out DecoArt Americana acrylics, but they are a cheaper alternative to most above paints, and I’ve seen a few alter artist mention them.
They seem to have a more matte finish, but don’t mix as easily and have less good coverage.
A Youtuber makes a comparison below here, if you want to see them compared to more professional brands.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_bHLqoHRJA
Brushes
I always recommend the same brushes for altering:
- at least one filbert brush (size 2-4, (synthetic) marten hair)
- at least one fine point brush, size 1 or smaller
- optional: a shader brush, older and more worn brushes.
The filbert brush allows you to quickly cover large parts in one color and can be excellent for making gradients. I always use one when I have to map out the background planes of an alter or quickly cover the whole card in its ground layer.
The fine point brushes are for painting the more minute details and filling in smaller parts of the art.
A few tips for those new to acrylic painting:
1) Acrylics dry very, very fast. This can be handy as you can work very quickly to cover a card, but it’s much tougher to get clean gradients. Keep this in mind as you build up your colors.
2) Acrylics can form clumps. This can be on the tip or your brush, but most likely will form near the metal ferrule. Clean your brushes well with lukewarm water and soap after painting.
During painting, it can help to put your wet brush on your paper towel, press your finger onto the ferrule and bristle, and firmly roll it back and forth. This rubs the clumps onto your towel.
Careful not to press/roll too roughly, as that can deform the tip. A water mug with a paint puck in it, or with a ribbed bottom, can also help prevent residue sticking to your brushes. Change your water often!
More cleaning tips for brushes here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxHqc_GtM48
3) Inevitably, some small particles of dust might gather onto your alter and your wet palette.
Keep an eye on how your brushes are performing. If the strokes seem off, some dust might be caught in the tip. You can pull this out with your fingers. If clumps, hair etc. have fallen into your paint, remove these asap.
Brands of brushes I have worked with that I recommend:
1) Mondrian miniature brushes
2) Accente acrylic brushes
3) Vallejo synthetic brushes
4) Citadel
If you don’t want to spend a lot of money on brushes, you can simply buy a nail art brush set.
These come in a range of tips, with liner, fans, filberts, flats etc. Perfect for starting out with! :)
Pick/ Sell/Play
Playability, finding your audience, and how to pick a card to alter
After the original artwork has been covered or tampered with, one might wonder whether people still actually play with alters? The answer is, very much yes!
Know your audience
A common audience for altered cards is the EDH (Elder Dragon Highlander or Commander) community, which often construct signature decks that they like to embellish.
The Vintage and Legacy communities frequently rotate the same sets of cards, and will often have a larger budget for cards.
Think of this as similar to car tuning/detailing: you’re driving the same thing, but you choose to embellish it in one way or another.
An important thing to keep in mind is that the altered cards aren’t considered marked.
If the paint is too thick, it will feel distinct from other cards in the deck when shuffled face down, which means it can be individually detected, and thus, is considered cheating.
There are exceptions, such as the Commander card itself, which will lay visibly open on the table when an EDH game starts. It will not be shuffled into the deck. There are even artists who sculpt a commander figurine and attach it to their card.
A Commander is a card which represents all the colors with which someone plays in their deck, and is a Legendary creature (or a card that states it can be a commander).
Here are examples of commanders:
Other examples where card appearance doesn’t matter, are tokens, counters, and emblems. These are placed apart from a deck. Some people even use glass marbles, coins, or dice to represent these.
Tokens are creatures, artifacts, or enchantments, that are evoked onto the battlefield through a card’s effect. Here are a couple examples:
Counters are added effects, for which a visual representation can come in handy.
The more common one are Poison and Energy counters.
Emblems are visual representations of a permanent buff or nerf a player has gained.
Most common emblems are received through a planeswalker card.
What card to pick
Now you know what types of cards you can go ham on, but given that there are over 27.000 Magic: the Gathering cards, how do you even go about picking one??
There are a number of ‘safe’ choices you can pick.
Firstly, basic lands are used in almost every deck, and they are the most common and easily accessible type of card there is. You will not ‘ruin’ an expensive card while practicing on this, and they are the perfect way to ease yourself into altering.
The basic lands are Island, Mountain, Forest, Plains, and Swamp.
Each set that comes out uses new images for its basic lands, so there’s a huge variety out there.
The earlier mentioned tokens are another safe choice, as they are quite often used. You can ask local players or look online for what currently are the most used kinds of tokens.
A 0/0 germ token, a */* artifact token, a cat (p/t varies), 1/1 squirrel, 1/1 bird, 1/1 elf, or 1/1 soldier token are all solid choices, as these are played in lots of popular kinds of decks.
Popular commander cards are also a relatively safe bet, such as Sol Ring, Arcane Signet, Command Tower, Evolving Wilds, Swords to Plowshares, Solemn Simulacrum, Lightning Bolt, Eternal Witness, Counterspell, Mana Leak, …
These all have a relatively low price and are considered staples of the format.
You can check a website such as this to see what the most commonly played cards are:
https://edhrec.com/top
Additionally, you may want to keep an eye on which cards are banned or restricted in certain formats:
https://magic.wizards.com/en/banned-restricted-list
The latter are cards that you will have a tough time selling, save for perhaps to dedicated collectors.
When in doubt, ask a (potential) client about it, or do some research.
You can buy the cards online, ask your client to provide you one, or go to a local LGS to acquire one from the shop or from a local player. Don’t buy a booster pack in the hope of getting the card you’re looking for. The chances of actually pulling the card are less than 1 in 10 if it’s a common card, and the odds only lower the more rare a card is. You’re better off buying or trading a single card.
Playability
As mentioned earlier, one of the most important things for an altered card is not to feel any different from a normal card. The thicker the paint on top, the more distinct a card will feel, for example.
The same goes for blobs and other kinds of marks on a card, that will allow a player to ‘feel’ out the card.
However, even if the card feels no different from a normal card, it can be refused to play with.
Ultimately, whether an altered M:tG card will be allowed to play with at a tournament, will always depend on the head judge, who will make the final call. There is no guarantee that an altered card can be officially played with. However, it’s often stated that it depends on whether a card is recognizable.
Most of the time, that will mean the title bar, casting cost, text box, and power/toughness must be visible.
As an alter artist, you can give those pointers to your clients, but it would be good form to advise them they must keep an unaltered copy of the card handy, in case the judge decides the alter is not allowed.
For kitchen table play, most players will probably not make any objections, as this is generally a chiller environment.
How to pick the artwork for your alter
A customer will most often come with a set idea to you for their alter. In case they don’t or you want to do an alter by yourself, finding an artwork that suits the card is up to you.
Ideally, the new artwork will fit the ‘flavor’ of the card. That means, thematically, the new artwork makes sense within the framework and meaning of the original card.
For example, there are a lot of alters of Sol Rings out there with the One Ring from The Lord of the Rings painted on them. Similarly, altered lands such as forests will most often depict some kind of greenery.
Imagining how an artwork will look on a card can be another struggle. You can use a website such as Card Conjurer to play around with how the art will fit on the card.
Alter examples
There are several styles of alters out there that have their own specific name.
In the subtabs, you can find visual examples of each style, and below here are definitions.
Main art alter: this covers up the original art window, partially up to completely.
It can insert a new detail, place a figure on top of the art, or fully change what is depicted to a new kind of artwork.
Border extension: here is either the original art or a new artwork painted on, but in both cases, the artwork is extended and covers the card’s original borders. This can be a continuation of the original artwork, or depict a new scenery.
Floating border: this is similar to a border expansion, but the border is left intact. This is particularly popular with older cards, giving the impression that the border is a floating ‘window’ or artifact in the scene.
Full art: here the text box is covered (sometimes with text still shining through), and the artwork takes up (almost) the whole card.
Most often, the title bar/card name, the casting cost, and the power/toughness text/box are left visible, but full coverage is often done, too (mainly on basic lands).
Panorama alters: the execution of these varies, but their ‘goal’ is the same: if you put them next to each other, their respective images will flow into one another.
Distressed alter: these alters make the card look worn in some kind of way. It can make it look as if the borders are burned, the textbox is shattered like glass, pieces of the framework are crumbling like rocks. These can be a fairly easy introduction to altering, depending on how complicated you go.
Foil (peel) alter: this is a different kind of style than painted altering, as it requires you to peel the top layer off of a foil card and cut it up to paste onto a card (or a sleeve).
Here is a tutorial on how to foil peel an alter:
https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/20ckif/howto_make_foil_peel_alters_fun_and_easy/
3D alters: alters in this style are built up of multiples of the same cards, creating a 3D effect by carefully cutting a few of them apart and building them up layer by layer.
This is most often done for Commanders (for the EDH playing format), where it can serve as a display piece. Sometimes, they are made into life counters, by inserting metal rods with pearls stringed on.
Main art alter
Border extension
Floating border
Full art
Panorama alter
Distressed alter
Foil (peel) alter
3D alters
