What Is UV Printing on Metal? How Our Token Cards Are Made
Every metal token we sell is UV-printed, and it's the single biggest reason they survive years of table time. Here's what that actually means, and how a plate goes from bare metal to a finished card.
UV printing in one paragraph
A UV printer lays down ink the same way an inkjet does — except each pass is immediately blasted with ultraviolet light, which cures the ink solid in a fraction of a second. The ink doesn't soak in or air-dry; it hardens in place and bonds to the surface. On metal, that produces a thin, tough layer of pigment that behaves less like "printing" and more like a factory coating.
Why not stickers or sublimation?
The cheap ways to put art on metal are a printed vinyl sticker or dye sublimation. Both have problems at the game table:
- Stickers delaminate. Edges lift, corners peel, and a year of thumbs turns the surface cloudy. You can usually spot a stickered token by its slightly raised edge.
- Sublimation needs a special polymer coating and tends to soften in detail and contrast — fine for a mug, less fine for painted art you want crisp at card size.
Cured UV ink is printed directly on the plate at high resolution, so there is no edge to lift and no coating to haze. It resists scratching, fading, and fingerprints far beyond either alternative.
From bare plate to finished token
- Cut. Steel and brass-finish plates are cut to standard TCG size, 63.5 × 88.9 mm, about 0.5 mm thick.
- Deburr and round. Every edge is deburred and every corner rounded to the same radius as a normal card, so plates are smooth in the hand and safe around the rest of your gear.
- Print. The art goes down edge to edge. On steel, the brushed grain shows through lighter passages and gives the art an industrial cast; on brass, a warm tone glows through instead. Same file, two genuinely different-looking cards.
- Inspect and pack. Each plate is checked by hand, sleeved for protection, and shipped flat.
Card stock five-packs run through the same print head too — an opaque white underbase first, then the art over the face of a genuine Riftbound bulk common, so the original card face disappears completely.
How it holds up
A UV-printed plate doesn't need a sleeve, though it fits one if you want the matched look. Normal play — sliding, tapping, stacking, the occasional trip in a backpack — is what it's built for. We won't pretend it's indestructible: enough deliberate abuse with something sharp will mark any printed surface. But in ordinary use the failure mode you're used to with cards and stickers simply doesn't show up.
If a plate ever arrives with a print defect, that's on us — a photo within 30 days gets you a free replacement under the guarantee.
See the finishes side by side
Every token page shows the same art on steel, brass, and card stock, priced side by side — start with the full catalog, or read our comparison of all three materials if you're deciding where metal is worth it.