"Add some bleed" is the advice everyone gives and almost nobody quantifies. Here's exactly what bleed and safe zones mean for a playing card, and the actual measurements print services use.
Cutting machines — at home with scissors or a trimmer, or industrial guillotines at a print house — are never perfectly precise. There's always a fraction of a millimeter of variance in exactly where the blade lands. If your card's background art stops exactly at the intended trim line, that tiny variance shows up as a thin white sliver of unprinted paper on one or more edges.
Bleed is the fix: extend your background art (not your text) past the trim line, so that even if the cut lands a little off, there's still printed color all the way to the physical edge. You're deliberately printing more than you need so the trim has room to be imprecise without it showing.
The mirror-image problem: if a cut lands too far inward, anything positioned right at the trim line — like a name or a stat number — can get clipped. The safe zone is a margin inside the trim line where you keep all text and important art, so the same cutting variance that bleed protects against on the outside doesn't clip your content on the inside.
Poker size — 2.5″ × 3.5″, or 63.5 × 88.9 mm — is the standard size for most trading and deck-building card games, and the numbers below (from MakePlayingCards' published print specs, one of the most widely used print-on-demand services for card games) are typical of what most print services expect:
| Measurement | Value |
|---|---|
| Finished (trimmed) card size | 63.5 × 88.9 mm (2.5″ × 3.5″) |
| Minimum upload size (with bleed) at 300 DPI | 822 × 1122 px |
| Safe zone margin | 36 px each side at 300 DPI (≈ 3 mm) |
In plain terms: your actual print file should be a little larger than the card itself (the bleed), and anything you don't want at risk of being trimmed off should sit at least ~3 mm in from every edge.
The same principles apply whether you're cutting cards yourself with scissors/a paper trimmer or sending files to a service like The Game Crafter or MakePlayingCards — but home cutting is less precise than an industrial guillotine, so err toward the generous end of bleed (3 mm or a little more) if you're printing and cutting by hand.
Cardwright handles bleed as a configurable per-project setting (3 mm default) with proper crop marks on every export mode — duplex, gutter-fold, and 300 DPI PNG. You don't have to remember the numbers; the tool applies them.