My Rant on Card Sleeves

mtg card sleevesI cannot imagine playing Magic without using card sleeves. Just thinking about shuffling cards without sleeves, and the mental image of the sides splitting and getting white makes me cringe.

These days there is no excuse for not protecting your cards, and yet, at every tournament, I still play against at least one person with an unsleeved deck.

WHY?!

Some cards are worth quite a bit, and not spending a few bucks to protect them from dust and friction just blows my mind. There are so many fun designs now too, that sleeving your deck can also be a bit of a statement – a neat way to express your personality as well as connect with other players on another level.

As far as basic colors go, I prefer Dragon Shield. I like these over all the other brands because of their strength to thickness ratio, their color selection and their consistency in size. For my more expensive decks I absolutely recommend double sleeving (shown below) and use Perfect Fits first followed by Dragon Shield.

double card sleeve 1double card sleeve 2

As their name suggests, Perfect Fits cover Magic cards like a glove and allow you to slide the sleeved card into another sleeve. Make sure the perfect fits are open side down, and the Dragon Shield are open side up. Otherwise you defeat the purpose of double sleeving.

For fun/themed/custom prints (like my awesome Boba Fett sleeves), I browse Amazon using the keyword + card sleeves; e.g. “Magic: The Gathering card sleeves”. Sometimes you will find what you are looking for and sometimes you will come up empty handed. But if you can find My Little Pony card sleeves, then with a little digging you should be able to find almost anything.

(Except Zelda. I would love to get the rights to print and distribute The Legend of Zelda card sleeves, since they do not seem to exist, but it seems Nintendo is a bit tight fisted with their intellectual property, who knew?! Maybe I will start a petition one of these days.)

Bottom line: Protect your cards by sleeving them.

What are your favorite sleeves? Leave a comment or picture below.

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2 Comments

  1. Walker
    Walker on September 27, 2017 at 9:57 am

    Personally, my favorite are the zelda ones by ultra pro

    Reply
    • Shaun Penrod
      Shaun Penrod on September 27, 2017 at 6:45 pm

      I love Zelda! I have a Zelda playmat. 🙂

      Reply

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