Card sleeve

Plastic card sleeves are used to protect trading cards, game cards, and collectible card game cards from wear and tear. The sleeves are a sheath of plastic into which a card is inserted.

Varieties

A wide variety of protective devices have been developed following the introduction of collectible card games, including the bulky "top-loader", a rigid plastic case with one open end (essentially a box for a single card) and the less-expensive simple "card sleeve", a card-sized envelope of clear plastic, with one end open.

Development

Once collectible card games became popular after the advent of Magic: The Gathering, new technology was needed for two reasons. First, existing devices were not made with shuffling in mind: rigid top-loaders are effectively impossible to shuffle, and traditional card sleeves would tear easily during shuffling. Card sleeves also became more important because of Magic tournaments: cards that were worn were considered to be marked, and could not be used in tournament decks. The card sleeves were also a potential marking device: one drawback of traditional card sleeves was that they were typically slightly nonuniform, and therefore a potential way of marking cards in a deck on their own.

History

In 1995, the Ultra Pro company released the first card sleeves designed specifically for collectible card games, which they called deck protectors. Deck protectors were a tougher and more uniform version of traditional card sleeves, made of polypropylene, and specifically designed to snugly fit traditional cards. The first deck protectors were clear, but soon after, deck protectors were offered with opaque black backs, which would obscure the actual back of the card, allowing worn cards to be used without "marking" the deck.