I'm not sure whether this is what you're looking for, but this guy has a tutorial for making swords out of plasti-card:
http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/636522.page
I'm not sure how applicable that tutorial is to cardstock (I assume you are referring to cardboard), but maybe you could use a similar technique and layer cardboard up, instead of trimming plasticard down?
EDIT: If you need some inspiration - I found this power klaw template:
http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/548808.page