Gamegenic – Inner Sleeves

What is a Card Sleeve?

In essence, Card sleeves or Deck protector sleeves as they were often called in the past, are thin sheath of plastic players use to protect their cards during storage, transport and MOST important during the actual game. Sleeves are available in different sizes to fit different type of cards, and they come in various colours and materials. In all cases, they main purpose is to protect trading cards, game cards, and collectible cards from wear and tear ensuring you can enjoy admiring and playing with your cards for years without the risk or damaging them.

In fact, the very first first deck protector sleeves were designed with the sole purpose of protecting collectible cards. These sleeves were called “Top-loader” as cards will be loaded from their upper side and they were quite rigid. Top-loaders are still available for those who focus only on collecting the cards but they are not practical is you are looking to play with them. In fact, the increasing popularity of collectible card games in the late 90s and the need to have a solution to protect the cards while playing with them lead to a massive re-design of the card sleeves. That’s when the rigid Top-loader evolved into more sleeves flexible (and thin) enough to allow players to easily shuffle their deck repeatedly. The current design of the card sleeves prioritizes their thickness and flexibility while still be strong enough to protect all cards from being damaged during play.

In recent years the amount of different types and manufacturers of sleeves has grown considerably as players have also started to use them in boardgames. Considering the amount of different products now available on the market, choosing which sleeve brand or product better fits your needs (and wallet) is not a trivial task. For example, the Gamegenic Inner Sleeves are a very peculiar type of product as you will see in the next section.

To sleeve or not to sleeve?

The very first question you should ask yourself before purchasing any card sleeve is if sleeving your cards is a sensible choice.

If you are playing a collectible card game like Magic: The Gathering or Pokemon or Disney Lorcana, sleeving your cards is a must. As a minimum, Sleeving will make shuffling your cards smoother although the biggest advantage is to make sure that your cards will not get damaged during play. It is also very important to remind that damaged cards are considered “marked cards” thus are not allowed in competitive events.

When it comes to boardgames, the choice is less obvious. Some games may have a HUGE amount of cards or perhaps multiple set of cards with different size in the same box. In some cases, your boardgames may also not be expensive or rare enough to justify the additional costs of adding sleeves to your cards. Last but not least, the card holders in your boardgame box may not be big enough to store sleeved cards.

While the most simple way to protect all your cards is to sleeve them, the challenge may not only comes from finding the one with the right size for your cards. In fact, while browsing for sleeves, you will found that these products comes in different thickness and they are often categorized further with keywords like “Soft”, “Penny”, “Inner” and “Outer” that can sometime confuse people a lot.

The first aspect to consider is always the thickness. This parameters is directly depend on the material the sleeve are made and it can range from 20 µm for the cheapest sleeves (“soft” or “penny” sleeves) to >60 µm for the more expensive ones. Obviously, the level of protection for your cards increases with the thickness. You really want thicker ones for the cards you play with while the cheaper ones can still be great to store your collection properly. The best sleeves for TCGs for example have one side made of more rigid block-out plastic while the other made of clear plastic so the overall thickness is >100 µm.

To complicate your life even further, sleeves can be also used to protect already sleeved cards to create up to three layers of protection. The most common situation is to use a thin “inner” or “perfect fit” sleeve of almost the same size of the card before adding a standard-size sleeve over it. The Gamegenic Inner sleeves, for example, are an example of the first category. In other cases, you can add an “over” or “3rd skin” sleeve to your standard sleeve. This is usually the case when your standard sleeve is a decorated one and you want to protect it from being damaged during playing.

Are Gamegenic Inner Sleeves the right sleeve for you?

When it comes to purchase card sleeves, I think a good list of criteria to consider includes:

1) Thickness. Sleeves thickness is measured in microns. The general rule that the thicker the sleeve, the more protection for the card inside applies only partially to Inner sleeves as it should be considered that thicker sleeves may reduce the possibility to double sleeve your card efficiently. Gamegenic Inner sleeves are 50 microns that is quite common for Inner sleeve and they offer a very good level of protection.

2) Sleeve Size and Product range. One key thing to know is that the size listed on the label of the sleeve package is not always the size of the sleeves themselves. Gamegenic is one of the few manufacturers that always details the size of the card sleeves AND the one of the cards that FIT into such sleeves. This is a great approach as really helps players to pick the right sleeves by measuring the cards while also knowing how larger the sleeves will be. In this case, Gamegenic Inner Sleeves are very suitable for all standard-size cards (Magic: The Gathering, Pokemon, Disney Lorcana etc). Interestingly, Inner Sleeves are just 1mm larger than the size of the card therefore they can be good choices for your boardgames’ cards as they will likely still fit in the same slot in the game insert.

3) Clear or Colour? It is quite obvious that a card sleeve should always have one side completely clear to allow to read the cards. Being Inner Sleeves, The Gamegenic ones are clear on both sides and they are very transparent for max card readability. While having fully clear Inner Sleeves is quite important, I personally recommend to use coloured ones over the Inner Sleeves just to add more protection to the cards.

4) Product Packaging. Gamegenic Inner Sleeve are available in packs of 100 sleeves. These size is quite handy if you are looking to use your Inner sleeves for all your collection or to sleeve multiple decks. I usually recommend to always buy some contingency and to keep spare sleeves together with their original label. Inner sleeves in particular can be easily mistaken for Standard-size ones and keeping them separated will be good.