Editing Proxy (section)

==Trading Card Games==
In many casual groups for TCGs (most notably Magic: The Gathering), a proxy card is a card that [[counts as]] another card. There's a couple of situations where this is relevant to the way people play.

* For deck testing, proxies are a fact of life. A group of people all need to be able to test any card available but actually getting hold of them can be extremely hard especially when a new set is released. When you stack that up with decks that they need to test against but won't be playing, the costs just keep going up. So proxies are what gets used a lot of the time to make sure that you can cover all the bases quickly and easily.
* There are tournaments (especially in extremely old formats where cards can be hilarious expensive, upwards of thousands of dollars) where proxies are in fact allowed. While these tend not to be official WoTC ones, they are still big, well organised events with very large prize pools. In these cases they generally let you proxy a set number of cards to try and get more people playing. That generally works because people always want to play Magic and especially the furiously complex formats where they can demonstrate their mental acuity (or lack of it) but can't spring the ten grand for a deck. 
* In casual formats proxies are occasionally allowable. Many groups who play commander allow for a set number of proxies, either to keep the circle fresh and let people try things or to keep costs down in what can be an expensive format too. Similarly when people put together Cube sets they might use proxies too. Depending on how and why they do it, this is either very cool or very not cool. If it's because you won't shell out the eight bucks for a rare then that's not cool. When you do it to add 'power' to the cube without adding an extra few grand to the price tag, that's normally fine. 
* Play with cards that don't actually exist. Always a casual event, except when official RND teams do this in private.

A side case for this are the really sexy, well produced proxies that some people have come out with. They are often as nice as official cards, although you can tell the difference. If you proxy using these kind of things then they become a LOT more acceptable. A borderless Jace, full art Dual Lands or any card with its modern text is almost always acceptable outside of the sanctioned formats. People sneer at proxies because they detract from the feel of the game. If a proxy looks sexy and conveys the right feel of power and awesome, as opposed to "feeling like a proxy", then no-one complains. 

Additionally proxies help people be freer with who they play their cube with. These cards cost a LOT of money. Like two months salary lots of money. But they are small and very easily lost, damaged or stolen. When you play with people you trust then it's not that big of a deal, but you need eight to draft and sometimes that means you end up with friends of friends, or just that guy you met at a GP. Having a set of proxies for most/all of the expensive cards means you don't need to worry about that. The expensive stuff stays at home, while everyone still gets the same kind of fun from the experience. We're not screwing around when we say these things are expensive. A cube is something like 700 cards. Many of them will cost a few bucks, some will cost tens and some may cost hundreds. This is a stack of cards that will cost over a thousand dollars at a minimum, and often closer to five thousand, potentially up to tens of thousands. I hate to keep harping on it, but it's true. Proxies let you protect your investment from dicks and sticky fingers, and people understand that.