I had 132 cards to pair with art that already lived on another page

One Figma page held 132 cards. Another held 164 names, and those already had the background and the object on top. The cards on the first page still had placeholder art, a blur, a gradient, and two text fields sitting on top.

The job was the same for every card: find the matching name, bring over the background and the object, hide the text, delete the blur and the gradient, and lay a 40% black fill on the background, above the image. The object stays bright. The background goes quieter.

By hand that is either a search through the other file, or a download of the assets for each name. I timed neither with a stopwatch. I wrote down the steps a person actually does, at a steady pace, once they already know both files.

Searching the other file is the shorter of the two. Read the name, find it among 164, check you have the right version, copy the background, copy the object, hide two text layers, delete blur and gradient, add the black fill and make sure it sits above the picture. About 3 minutes 30 seconds when the name is there. About 2 minutes 40 seconds when it isn’t, because you still search, then you still clean the card.

For 132 cards that is about 7 hours 30 minutes.

Downloading the background and the object instead means leaving Figma: find the name, save two files, import them, scale and crop both, then do the same cleanup. About 7 minutes 15 seconds a card when the folder is already organized. About 15 hours 14 minutes for the set. Longer if the files are buried in a site or a zip.

Cursor read both pages and matched the visible names, not just the frame slug. Ampersands, apostrophes, and a version number glued on the end still counted as the same item. When several versions existed, it preferred the one with the same suffix.

On each match it copied the background image and the object, hid the text, removed blur and gradient, and added black at 40% opacity as a fill on the Background layer. The black fill has to be the top one. Figma paints the first fill at the bottom, so the first attempt sat under the picture and did nothing visible.

118 cards got the art. That is 89% of the page. Reviewing the result took about 8 minutes. Against searching the file, that is about 7 hours 22 minutes back. Against downloading assets, about 15 hours.

The frames got replaced once, and the same pass ran again on the new set. The useful part was that it could be repeated, not that it was clever the first time.

Fourteen cards had no pair in the source set of 164. Seven names, two versions each. A person searching that same file would not have found them either. The text is hidden, the blur and gradient are gone, and the black fill is on the background. The art is still the placeholder.

The matching was the boring part, and it was most of the time. I still had to look at the cards, decide that a missing name stays missing, and notice when a fill was in the wrong order. That is the part I don’t want a script to guess.