Card protection: what to use and when

A sleeve is the minimum everything else builds on. Without one the card collects fingerprints and dust, and the corners whiten after a single evening of shuffling. Wear on the back is worse than it looks: a card you can recognise from behind is a marked card, and it disqualifies the whole deck.

For play, use sleeves that are opaque at the back, all the same colour and ideally from one batch. Thickness is a trade-off: 50 microns gives a thinner deck and shuffles better, 100 microns lasts longer. Corvus Light is the thinner version, so a hundred cards fit in a box where thicker sleeves no longer do.

This is a consumable and should be treated as one. Replace sleeves once the edges start splitting or the film goes cloudy. The point is not to protect the sleeve, it is to keep it protecting the card underneath.

Sleeves printed with game artwork cost several times more apiece than plain ones and protect not one millimetre better. People buy them for two reasons: the look, and the certainty that the whole deck has exactly the same back, including after a second pack bought a year later. With plain sleeves it is enough to stay within one batch.

For Naruto Mythos we have official sleeves from Cicaboom, the publisher of the game, in four designs: Gold Naruto, Orange Naruto, Blue Sasuke and Red Itachi. A pack holds 60, which covers a whole deck (at least 30 cards plus 3 missions) with spares for replacing worn ones. They are PVC-free and acid-free, and since it is the same card size, they also fit Pokémon and Lorcana. From Store Championship level up sleeves are mandatory at tournaments and the whole deck must use identical ones, so sleeve the deck from a single design. Missions may use a different one.

Two layers, each with its own job. The inner one is clear, goes on tight and loads from the TOP. The outer one, with the coloured back, loads from the BOTTOM. The card ends up sealed on both sides, with no open edge for dust to get in.

The directions are the whole trick, and the most common mistake. Load both sleeves the same way and the card keeps one open side, which during shuffling takes in whatever is on the table. The second layer then only adds thickness.

Worth it when the card costs more than a full deck of sleeves, when you play with it regularly, or when the deck travels to tournaments. For a card sitting in a binder and never shuffled it is money spent for nothing: one layer is enough there, and the binder pocket does the rest.

A sleeved deck carries worse than a bare one. The film is slippery, the cards slide apart in your hand, and a deck thrown loose into a backpack comes apart inside and creases the sleeves at the edges. A box holds it together and that is its whole job: it protects the sleeves, and the sleeves protect the card.

Always read the capacity as a number of SLEEVED cards, not bare ones. The same box takes around a hundred and sixty unsleeved cards and barely over a hundred sleeved, because the film adds thickness on both sides of every card. A box sold as holding 60 cards will not take a playing deck, even though a deck is exactly sixty.

Whether a box survives the season comes down to the closure. A magnet and a rigid snap catch hold the lid for years, while an elastic band goes slack until the lid opens by itself. A built-in point tracker is an extra whose value only shows in play: you are not hunting for a tally sheet or a spare die to count lore.

Pick the size for a double-sleeved deck. A sixty-card deck, as in Pokémon TCG and Lorcana, needs a 100+ box. The smaller 50+ takes up to 45 double-sleeved cards or over 55 in inner sleeves only, so it suits smaller decks. Several decks at once, together with dice and tokens, belong in a storage box: the Fourtress 320+ has four compartments for 320 double-sleeved cards and a lock in the lid.

The simplest way to kit out a first Naruto Mythos deck is the Blind Box Gold set. One pack holds a flip-top deck box for 100 sleeved cards and 60 Naruto Gold sleeves in the same gold design. The sleeved deck fits inside together with cards you swap in during a tournament. Already have a box? The sleeves alone, from the playing sleeves section, are enough.

A club or café table is the worst surface your cards will lie on. Crumbs, spilled drinks and grains of sand act like sandpaper every time a card slides, first on the sleeve, then on the card itself. A playmat separates the cards from the table: the smooth, fine surface does not collect dirt, the rubber takes cards and dice softly, and the non-slip base keeps it from sliding around.

The standard size is 610 x 350 mm. It fits one player's play area with the deck, the discard pile and the cards in play, so one mat covers every game in our catalogue. A plain mat without artwork goes with everything, and you pick the colour for yourself, not for the deck.

Never fold a playmat. The fold stays for good as a ridge that cards slide on. For travel, roll the mat up and put it in a tube: the rigid wall protects it from being crushed in a backpack, and the hexagonal profile stops the tube rolling off the table.

A hard plastic pocket, open at the top. This is not storage, it is TRANSPORT: shipping, trading in person, selling, moving a card from one place to another. A card can sit in a toploader for months, but it gains nothing from it.

Put the card in sleeved, never bare. A toploader is a hair wider than a card and has a cut plastic edge inside. A bare card slides with every movement and scrapes its corners along it. The sleeve is a spacer here, not an extra.

A toploader does not close by itself. For shipping, tape across the top, never across the card, and put the whole thing in a bubble mailer. A bare toploader in a plain envelope cracks at the sorting centre, and then it protects the card worse than cardboard would.

There are two tiers. A plain toploader costs a zloty apiece and does exactly what it should when shipping. An Exoshield adds UV protection in the walls and a removable protective film on the face, and at 25 to a pack it works out at 72 groszy each. Reach for it when cards stay in toploaders for longer than a week, or stand in the light.

Two rigid panels closed with a magnet. It opens without screws and without force, so the card does not rub against the edges going in, and once closed it cannot move. The walls carry a UV filter that slows fading. It is the only option here that thinks about light at all.

Use it for two things: a card standing on a shelf or in a frame, and shipping something genuinely valuable. It is no use for a deck. One card per holder, and every holder is thicker than ten sleeved cards.

Holder thickness is given in points. 35 pt takes an ordinary card, sleeve included, and that is the size that fits everything in our catalogue; the thicker numbers are for cards with a patch or a piece of fabric, which trading card games do not use. Buying your first one? Take 35 pt and look no further. For several cards at once the five-pack works out cheaper: per holder it costs almost half of what a printed one does.

A holder will not stand on its own. Lying on a desk it shows the card only to whoever leans over it, and propped against something it slides down at the first nudge. A stand holds it upright or flat, whichever you choose, and the wide foot keeps it from tipping over.

Pick the colour for the shelf, not for the card. A black stand disappears under the holder and leaves the artwork all the attention, so it works where the background is light; a white one does the same on a dark shelf, because its outline does not merge into it. The white, black and red version nods to the Poké Ball and belongs next to Pokémon TCG cards. We print them ourselves, and what you get is the stand alone: the holder and the card are yours to add.

A binder is the only way to keep a set so it can be viewed without taking cards out of anything. One thing matters: SIDE-LOADING pockets. A top-loading pocket lets the card out by itself when you turn the page or stand the binder on its edge.

Two routes, and the closure is what separates them. A zippered binder holds everything even lying spine-down in a backpack, and that is the one you take travelling; a ring binder does the job as well as a stitched collector binder. A binder without a closure is lighter and cheaper but has to be carried flat, so it stays on the shelf.

Manufacturers give capacity sometimes in cards and sometimes in pockets per page, so comparing two binders means converting to one unit first. Buy pages separately when you already own a ring binder: eighteen pockets means cards on both sides of one page, so twice as many at the same thickness. A black backing instead of a clear one has a real reason: the card stands out from the page and its neighbour on the other side does not show through.

Pick the format for what the binder has to carry. Four pockets per page means forty sleeved cards and a thickness that fits in a backpack next to a deck, so that version travels to tournaments and trades. Nine pockets is a binder for browsing at home: a hundred and twenty-six cards, or twice that with two per pocket. Collecting a set to completion? Take the bigger one from the start, because every move between binders is another chance to bend a corner.

For a Naruto Mythos collection there are official Deluxe binders from Cicaboom: 40 pages of 9 pockets, so 360 cards, and a cover held by an elastic band. The four designs - Naruto Ramen, Naruto Flames, Naruto Brushes and Naruto Gold Foglia - differ only in the cover; capacity and size (270 x 310 x 30 mm) are the same. The band keeps the covers together on a shelf and in a backpack, but it is not a zip, so when travelling carry the binder flat.