Pantone Matching — Why Every Iconic Cards Chase Card Gets a Custom Colour

Every Iconic Cards chase card has at least one Pantone-matched custom colour mixed for it. Sometimes two. Sometimes three. It's the most expensive ink decision we make and the one customers comment on most without quite knowing why.

This is what Pantone matching actually is, why we use it on chase cards, and what it changes about how a card looks.

What Pantone matching means

A standard trading card is printed in CMYK — Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black, the four process colours that together can simulate most colours by combining tiny dots. CMYK is what every regular print press uses. It's reliable, it's cheap, and it covers about 80% of the visible colour spectrum well enough.

The other 20% — the colours CMYK can't produce — is where Pantone matching comes in. Pantone is a colour standardisation system: every Pantone colour is a specifically mixed ink, formulated to a precise recipe of base pigments, that produces exactly that colour every time it's printed. There are over 2,200 Pantone colours in the standard system.

When you "Pantone match" a card, you specify a Pantone colour for a particular element, and the printer mixes that ink to spec and runs it as a fifth, sixth or seventh plate on the press — in addition to the standard four CMYK plates.

What CMYK can't do

There are four families of colour that CMYK consistently fails to reproduce:

Saturated oranges. CMYK orange is always slightly muddy because it's a mix of yellow and magenta, and the printable yellow-to-magenta gamut narrows hard in the orange range. A pure, bright orange — like a Pantone 165 — cannot be hit in CMYK.

Saturated greens. Same problem in reverse. Bright pure greens (Pantone 354, for example) sit outside the printable CMYK gamut.

Bright blues. Process blue (the C in CMYK) is a teal-leaning cyan. A true bright blue — the kind you get on signage or sportswear — needs Pantone 286 or similar.

Metallics and fluorescents. CMYK cannot reproduce these at all. They are entirely outside the system. Anything that needs to look genuinely metallic or genuinely neon is a Pantone job.

For chase cards we frequently want exactly these colours. The chase card is supposed to jump out of the set. CMYK whispers; Pantone shouts.

What it costs us

Pantone matching isn't expensive in absolute terms — a single Pantone plate adds roughly £180–250 to a print run, regardless of run size. But it's logistically slow.

Each Pantone plate adds one full press pass. A standard 4-colour print run takes one pass through the press. A 4-colour-plus-one-Pantone run takes two. A run with three Pantone colours takes four passes. Each pass means the press has to be re-set, re-aligned, and the previous pass given time to dry between runs.

For a 2,000-card run with two Pantone plates plus standard CMYK plus cold-foil plus spot UV — that's a six-pass press run. Setup takes a full day. Print time is two days. The Pantone elements are why.

What it changes visually

The way Pantone-matched colour looks different from CMYK is hard to describe and obvious in person.

A CMYK orange on a printed card, viewed under good light, looks orange. A Pantone 165 orange on a printed card, viewed under the same light, looks more orange than the orange you're looking at on the card next to it. The colour has a presence the CMYK version doesn't. It also doesn't lose vibrancy as the ambient light dims — Pantone colours hold saturation across lighting conditions far better than CMYK simulations of the same colour.

For a card collector this matters when:

• Photographing the card — Pantone colours photograph more cleanly, look more accurate on screen
• Displaying the card — Pantone colours don't go muddy under display lighting
• Comparing the card — side-by-side, the Pantone version reads as the "real" version

The Wallace & Gromit example

Our Wallace & Gromit chase card uses three Pantone-matched colours plus CMYK plus cold-foil. The three Pantone colours: Wallace's tank-top green (a specific mid-bright green that's exactly the green from the films, mixed against the production designer's original swatches), the title-card red (a strong saturated red that CMYK couldn't hit), and a single accent — the Wensleydale yellow — used only on the cheese-related elements.

You can see this if you put the chase card next to the base cards. The base cards use CMYK approximations of the same greens, reds and yellows. They look fine. The chase card looks right.

That difference is the whole point of the Pantone investment.

What we won't do

We won't use Pantone on base cards. Every Iconic Cards set uses CMYK base cards plus Pantone-matched chases plus foil-and-UV finishing on the rarest cards. The cost stack doesn't justify Pantone on a base card; the visual benefit doesn't justify it either.

If a customer asks us to print a custom set entirely in Pantone — we'll explain why we don't recommend it. The Pantone effect is a contrast effect. It works because the chase card looks different from the base cards. Print everything in Pantone and you lose the contrast and the chase loses its punch.

The honest reason

The honest reason we pay for Pantone matching, underneath all the gamut arguments, is this: chase cards are the cards collectors keep.

A base card might end up in a binder. A chase card gets sleeved, toploaded, photographed, framed, held against light, looked at for ten years. The £200 we spend on a Pantone plate is amortised across the lifetime of a card someone is going to keep. It's a small investment in something durable.

Browse our current sets — and if you've got a chase card from one of our sets in your collection, hold it under a desk lamp and tilt it. The colours that don't go muddy are the Pantone-matched ones.

— Laurence