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Mana Masters: a boxed TCG in 12 working days
100 units. 12,000 cards. Two tuck-box decks inside a soft-touch rigid box — designed, corrected and manufactured in New Zealand.
What Card Game Crafter needed
Mana Masters is a stat-based trading card game built around head-to-head attribute comparison. Card Game Crafter wanted it to arrive as a complete product rather than a bag of components — something that looked like a collector's item on a shelf and held together after repeated play.
That meant three different things manufactured to three different specifications, and then assembled into one item.
What we made
Each unit is a rigid two-piece box containing two tuck-box decks of 60 cards, plus the rulebook. Across the run that's 200 tuck boxes and 12,000 cards.
The cards
300gsm card stock — the standard for a game where cards are shuffled, fanned and handled constantly.
The tuck boxes
350gsm with a semi-gloss finish. Heavier than the cards, because a tuck box takes the wear: it gets opened, closed and carried, and a lighter stock softens at the corners quickly.
The rigid presentation box
A greyboard core, die-cut and hand-assembled, then wrapped in printed 120gsm stock and finished with matt soft-touch lamination.
Rigid boxes aren't folded from a single sheet the way a tuck box is. The greyboard is cut to size, the printed wrap is bonded over it under pressure, and the corners are turned by hand. It's a slower process, and it's why the box holds its shape instead of crushing — which matters when the box is the thing keeping the game together.
The soft-touch lamination gives it a matt, almost velvet surface. It's the finish that makes someone pick a box up off a shelf.
The artwork
Card artwork arrived ready. The packaging didn't — the tuck boxes and the rigid box were developed with us, because box artwork isn't a rectangle. A tuck box is a flat die-line with tabs, flaps and glue areas, and a rigid box needs a wrap sized to allow for the turn-over at every edge.
There were problems in the supplied files. We worked through them together rather than sending everything back and waiting — which is usually the difference between a job that ships on time and one that doesn't.
This is the single most common thing we help with. If your files aren't perfect, that's normal.
Twelve working days
From approved artwork to finished product: 12 working days, including the hand-assembly of 100 rigid boxes.
The comparison worth making is with the offshore route for the same job — typically a 500 to 1,500 unit minimum, three to six months of production, then thirty to sixty days on a ship, plus customs. For a 100-unit run that route isn't slower, it's simply unavailable.
Making something like this?
If your game needs a presentation box, multiple decks, or a mix of specs in one job, we can quote the whole thing — see trading card printing, or test the deck first with a prototype run.
Get a quote on your game
Tell us the card count, the packaging you have in mind and roughly how many units. We'll come back with a price and a timeline.
Request a quote