(also answering to http://infinity-wars.wikia.com/wiki/Thread:5241)

I realize this is pretty late but I only just discovered these posts, I figured out a way to extract game files and make gifs from them a while back when trying to get avatars of card alt arts/transformations and cards which were planned but never made the final cut (aka the 'unused' section of this thread http://forum.lightmare.com.au/index.php?topic=61806.0)

The process is quite intricate however, as the games files aren't just a gif but a set of frames, and the order of said frames is unintuitive and rather annoying, plus the files aren't naturally editable in image editing programs so before you can even think of putting the frames in the right order you have to convert the file to a valid image type, which isn't difficult but just ads to the time and annoyance, but yeah I extract the files that make up a card, find the file with the frames, convert the file to jpg, cut the frames up in image editor WHICH HAS CAPACITY FOR GIFS (i use fireworks but photoshop should also be fine), put each frame as a 'state', give each 'state' about 8-9 100ths of a second time and then save as an animted gif.

Needless to say I much prefer just recording a video of a card while holding alt and then converting to gif for my avatars, so I've only really used this method on cards I could not otherwise obtain since its so time consuming, but if you guys (and cleanse?) really want to be adding animations for every card I could show you how.

NatoPotato, how big can you make the gifs using the method you used to make the forum avatars? If that's much easier as you say, we probably should just do that.

In terms of adding gifs to EVERY card, that'd be awesome, but obviously a puffy load of work. So more of a distant goal.

well usually its ok, now that we have the alt function, but unfortunately for some cards the title and border can cause some of the picture to be cropped.

This picture shows the possible resolutions for the screen capture method, as you can see in this example if i take the wider option the hulkers back gets cropped off, while if i use the taller option you lose some of the horn (which isnt so bad, but just for the sake of the example), both options will still lose a decent chunk of the tail due to the title not disappearing along with the rest of the text. (still waiting for them to fix that)

But yeah for most cards screen capture is fine, but for some it's actually worth it to do extraction.

all you need for that method is a screen recorder of some kind, and an image editor with gif support.

just record a video of the card a few seconds long and then use a website to convert the video to a gif (i use http://www.online-convert.com/ but im sure there are plenty of other services) then open the gif in your image editor, find 2 frames/states that are exactly the same to find 1 'loop' of the cards animation and delete the rest of the states (and maybe duplicate states within the loop depending on your screen recorders frame rate), then set the time/speed of the states (most cards should have about 20 frames with a time of 10-9 100ths of a second for each, some are a bit slower/faster or have longer animations though so just gotta save and check while editing to make sure it looks right) and then just save the image.

you will need to make sure the video recorder is recording with a frame rate of at least 10 fps.

Fantastic, thanks for the info!