Metal vs Card Stock Tokens: Which Should You Buy?

We print the same token art three ways — brushed stainless steel, warm brass-finish metal, and five-packs on genuine card stock — so we get this question every week: which one should I actually buy? Here's the honest answer, including the cases where the cheaper option is the right call.

What's actually different

Stainless steel is the workhorse. It's a 304 stainless plate around 0.5 mm thick, brushed to a satin grain, with the art UV-printed edge to edge. It weighs about 25 g — roughly fifteen times a normal card — and it lands on the table with a sound you'll start doing on purpose.

Brass finish is the same cut and print process on a brass-finish metal plate, polished and sealed under lacquer. It runs a little heavier at about 28 g, and the warm gold tone changes how art reads — darker painted pieces glow on brass in a way steel doesn't match.

Card stock five-packs are real cards. We take genuine Riftbound bulk commons bought at retail, lay down an opaque white underbase, and UV-print our token art over the face. You get authentic thickness, texture, and shuffle feel, five copies at a time.

When card stock is the right answer

Metal looks and feels premium, but quantity beats material more often than people admit:

• Wide token decks. If your deck can flood the board with four or five of the same unit, one gorgeous metal token and a pile of dice is a worse table state than five matching printed cards. Buy the five-pack.
• Sleeved play. Card stock tokens fit any standard sleeve, so they can match the rest of your setup exactly.
• Trying an art style. A five-pack is the cheap way to find out whether a set's look works on your table before committing to the full metal set.

When metal earns its price

• Tokens you play every game. A token that hits the table constantly is the one worth upgrading — it's the piece of your setup opponents handle and remember.
• Durability without babying. Cured UV ink on metal shrugs off the scuffing and drink-adjacent hazards that eventually soften any card. No sleeve required, nothing to replace.
• Gifts. A complete metal set arrives in a fitted foam tray inside a gift box. Nobody has ever been excited to unwrap a five-pack of commons.

One durability note in fairness: card stock tokens are still cards. They'll age like cards — which is fine, because five copies means spares.

Do metal tokens scratch anything?

No. Every plate is deburred and corner-rounded to the same radius as a standard card, then hand-inspected before it ships. And because tokens never get shuffled into a deck, they never touch your sleeved cards in play anyway. (More on how the printing itself holds up in our UV printing guide.)

The short version

Buy five-packs for tokens you need in multiples, metal for the one or two tokens that define your deck, and brass when the art runs warm or it's a gift. Every set page prices all three side by side, and everything is covered by the same 30-day money-back guarantee — if the finish you picked doesn't feel right at your table, we'll make it right.