Everything You Need to Know About Double-Sleeving Your TCG Cards

If you play the classic trading card games Magic: The Gathering, Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Flesh and Blood or Lorcana, 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 double-sleeving comes into play.

Why double-sleeve your trading cards?

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. So-called 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 Sleeves or Katana Inner Sleeves.

What kind of inner sleeves are there?

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.

How to double-sleeve a trading card

• Insert the card top-first into the inner sleeve, so that the sleeve's opening ends up at the bottom of the card. This is the reverse of how you'd normally sleeve a card.
• Next, take the card—now inside the inner sleeve—and insert it bottom-first into the outer sleeve, just as you would when sleeving a card normally.

This method ensures your card is fully protected from external elements, keeping out moisture, dust, and dirt!

(Note: This method applies only to top-loading or resealable inner sleeves. If you're using side-loading inner sleeves, simply insert the card sideways into the sleeve. However, be careful! While side-loading sleeves are quicker and easier to use than top-loaders or resealables, especially when sleeving large numbers of cards, they offer less protection against moisture. That’s because the inner sleeve's opening starts at the top of the outer sleeve, rather than being sealed off at the bottom.)

Double-Sleeving: Additional tips

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 gently appy preasure with your hand or 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 sleev. Or simply fixate the inner sleeve with your finger at the middle of the card while sliding it in.

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.