Everything you need to know about Double-Sleeving

If you play the classic trading card games Magic the Gathering, Pokémon or Yu-Gi-Oh or the new trends Flesh & Blood or Digimon, the cards in your collection always have a value which you want to preserve.

The fundamental reason these cards exist is for playing with your friends for fun or to compete in tournaments. But playing with your cards will decrease the value of them through wear and tear.

To protect your cards from getting damaged during playing, sorting and deckbuilding, you can put them in sleeves. But even if you put them in our premium Katana sleeves, which are highly durable and come with the perfect shuffle feel, there are some things that can still damage your precious cards. This is where the Precise-Fit inner sleeves come into play.

Why double sleeve?

Card connoisseurs are aware of the dangers that are lurking on the game tables and bookshelves. Dust, sweaty hands, moisture in the air and worst of all... the spilled drink!

Everyone has seen sugary, sticky, colorful drink spilled all over the game table, destroying valuable treasures on its way. Inner sleeves can protect your cards from this disaster by preventing liquids from entering your sleeves and damaging them.

The same is true for small particles and dust which enter regular sleeves through the top-opening and damage the surface of the card. Especially on foil cards, you can see small scratches which come from playing or just from storing your cards in boxes.

Sorting your cards or sleeving them also creates surface stress which can easily be prevented through inner sleeves like our Precise-Fit.

What kind of inner sleeve?

The most used sleeves are the top loading inner sleeves.

If you want to have 360° protection and you have a special clumsy friend who always spills his or her drink, then the resealable sleeves are your perfect fit.

For your collection in your side-loading pocket binder you can use side-loading sleeves.

If you don’t like the color of the border of your card and you prefer them to be black, you can grab a pack of the Precise-Fit Bordifies.

Playing with double-sided cards or competing in a tournament, it is crucial to have fully opaque sleeves. Sleeves with lighter colors, such as white and yellow, tend to be not fully opaque. For those sleeves you can use the Undercover sleeves to increase the opacity. Just a reminder: all colors of our Katana Sleeves are fully opaque and you can use regular Precise-Fit Sleeves to increase the protection of your cards.

How to double sleeve

The most important thing that you need to know is that you always put the card in the inner sleeve from the opposite side compared to your regular sleeve.

Using a fresh pack of inner sleeves can sometimes be tricky and can create air pockets. To get rid of the air pockets you just need to store your cards tightly together in a deck box.

If you have issues with the card sliding out of the inner sleeve during the sleeving process, you can use two cards to guide the double-sleeved card into the regular sleeve.

So, do I double sleeve every card in my collection? No, I don’t. Although inner sleeves cost just a couple of cents per sleeve, the hassle is sometimes too much.

Booster Draft, Cube Draft and Commander are the main formats I play. My limited Magic decks are never double sleeved, as they usually don’t have any cards that are very valuable. But my Commander decks are all in Precise-Fit inner sleeves and Katana regular sleeves. The same is true for my cube and the basic lands I have prepared for it. For my collection of cards that are not in any deck at the moment, I use inner sleeves for regular rare and mythic cards and foil cards of any rarity.

But of course, you can always use inner sleeves the way that best fits your needs.

Editor's note: This post is a guest entry by former Magic: The Gathering Pro Player Babak Rau.