Has anybody used artscow.com to print off their own custom content? If so, is anybody able to tell me if they can print the small cards and the investigator sheets?

I've used Artscow to print several things, including encounter and small cards for AH variants. However, they only print the standard playing card size (basically 3.5 x 2.5), so none of the AH cards fit that exactly. So for the small size cards, I have a lot of extra black border around everything, and for the larger cards (encounters, OW cards) there is extra black space on the sides. But as long as they don't need to be integrated with existing decks, then they still work great. You may need to use the "multi-purpose" cards to get different backs. Investigator/GOO/herald sheets will not work at that size, of course, but those you can easily print out and cut out on heavyweight paper and they work fine.

Excellent. Thank you very much for sharing those tips with me. For the investigator sheets, etc, what type of heavyweight paper have you found works the best- ie: what is closest to the actual game components?

Here are examples of what the graphics look like for custom AH cards I've made through Artscow. Note the extra black space around the sides... more prominent for the smaller card (the Ally). Actually, now that I look at these again, they look to have about the same size background, so I think I might have stretched the smaller card to be larger and fit the card size better. But anyway, printed out, they look great and work fine. Everything has to be 300 dpi, and I size them at 3.75 x 2.75, which seems to work pretty well.

For printing investigators, GOOs, etc., just get the heaviest paper that will work in your printer, or have someplace like Staples print them. To me, it doesn't really matter if they match the published materials that well, because they still work great, but I suppose if you intend to shuffle them with the existing materials then you'd want to get a better match.

What does the backside of that encounter card look like? I'm trying to figure out how much work would be involved in using this service for a custom herald

The backside can look like whatever you want it to. You can have a 54 card deck that all has the same custom background, and you can also have a deck with multiple backgrounds (for a few more $$).

Here's what the whole deck looks like at a glance:

So it looks to me like the cards are a little bigger than the large format that is standard for Arkham, which means it should do to make a deck that is not going to get mixed in with others. Correct?

I never ordered from Arts Cow but would't it be possible to order the cards at the correct size with the black border filling the rest of the card and then cut it to make the correct size?

Irxson said:

Yeah, I suppose, but that's a lot of cutting and probably won't look that great or integrate well. But as long as you're using things that don't need to integrate into existing decks, then the size doesn't matter.