I recently resleeved my cube in toploaders to increase their durability. The only problem is ensuring that they are shuffled properly. Does anyone have any tips on shuffling large numbers of cards in toploaders?
Wow , I use to do this back in highschool. Its just a PITA to shuffle. But I agree , they do protect the cards. May I know are the cards really that high in value and toploaders are needed?
Wow , I use to do this back in highschool. Its just a PITA to shuffle. But I agree , they do protect the cards. May I know are the cards really that high in value and toploaders are needed?
It's mostly because of the lack of care that my group has toward the cards. I'm overly cautious because of them.
Everyone (and I mean everyone) that I know who plays vintage IRL plays with top loaders.
Riffle shuffle like normal. Unless you have small hands, get half in each hand, then shuffle using your thumbs to control the rate with each pile falls. Resist the urge to just pile shuffle. If you do have small hands, divide the pile into 3 or 4 piles and then shuffle.
When I first switched to toploaders, some issues included chaffing my fingers from top loader edges, and in long tournaments your elbows will start to hurt. Practice is the only solution, really.
Note that quite a number of judges won't allow toploaders in sanctioned tournaments.
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"Sometimes, the situation is outracing a threat, sometimes it's ignoring it, and sometimes it involves sideboarding in 4x Hope//Pray." --Doug Linn
Yeah, I'm considering putting my cube in Top Loaders also because of my play group. They somehow manage to bend my cards even when they are double sleeved.
I'm guessing pile shuffling and then rifle shuffling would probably be your best bet though.
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"Of course you should fight fire with fire. You should fight everything with fire." —Jaya Ballard, task mage
Holy crap how big would a cube be if it was entirely sleeved in toploaders? It'd just be super annoying to play with imo.
I double sleeve my cube, and tell people to just take freaking care of my cards. I don't want to play with people who don't give a damn.
Edit:
Found some toploaders hanging around and put some of my cube in them:
This is just eight cards:
Even with only a very small amount of cards I could tell shuffling would be a pain in the butt using these. Holding just a regular hand of 7 cards with toploaders became tiresome very quickly.
I've tried those already. A couple people in my playgroup somehow managed to bend cards through those even. I have yet to see them damage a top loader though
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"Of course you should fight fire with fire. You should fight everything with fire." —Jaya Ballard, task mage
I've tried those already. A couple people in my playgroup somehow managed to bend cards through those even. I have yet to see them damage a top loader though
It's not really possible to play with toploaders. I would suggest that you tell your playgroup buddies to stop bending cards or stop playing. Double sleeves should be more than enough.
I'm going to echo the posts saying to teach your group to respect your gear. why play with them if they aren't willing to respect your property that you put plenty of cash into?
Take your monoblack deck, then set aside 14 swamps. Add 4 Creeping Tar Pits, 4 Darkslick Shores, 4 Drowned Catacombs, and 2 Jwar isle Refuge and add 4 Jace, the Mindsculptors. Your monoblack deck is instantly better. Better yet, drop those refuges, throw in some islands and some mana leaks, and lo and behold, you're now playing a real deck. Congratulations. Welcome to the world of competitive M:TG.
Use semi rigid card holders. They're about as durable as a top loader but thinner and easier to handle. You can also cut or snap off the top half inch lip if it bugs you, but its not needed.
Cut the deck in two parts. Bring you hands together (thumbs touching). Lift up and let the two halves fall together.
Firsthand experience: I sleeved one of my EDH decks in toploaders just for the lulz. I couldn't really shuffle it, so I threw my deck into a big bucket and just shook it a lot to get the cards mixed up. Whenever I needed to draw a card, I just closed my eyes and reached into the big bucket. Thankfully, I wasn't playing any tutors.
Seriously, though: don't do this. Toploaders is really overkill unless you're dealing with individual cards that are worth more than my student loans, like mondu_the_fat said. Your playgroup just needs to be more careful.
Seriously - who the hell do you play with who can't keep from destroying your cards?
Teach them that they need to not break them. If they keep breaking them, find the people who are doing it and don't allow them to play unless they recoup you for replacement costs.
If you are like me (means you care about keeping mint condition on your cards) then the only solution is the toploaders. I have tried almost everything including many brands of sleeves, double sleeve, triple sleeve (kmc sleeve protectors) etc.
None of these methods ensure the safety of your cards and thats because of one simple term: friction. As long dirt exists it will catch up your cards and slowly destroy them as you shuffle (toploaders prevent that cause of the rigid plastic so your cards stay intact during shuffling).
If the pilot of the deck is reckless (means he bends cards, scratch his face with sleeves, drops cards off the table, has bad shuffling technic etc) then say goodbye to your precious foils/50$+ cards you spent your money last week.
Although using toploaders you sacrifice one major thing: comfort. Bigger decks (triple the normal size in height) means harder transport and managing. One plus here is that playing with topladers makes tap/untap and moving cards on board more fun and easier cause they slide a lot better.
Its a big dilemma cause if you own 5+ decks its a big issue toploading them cause you need a lot of space (you will watch your friend's deckboxes like holy grail or something).
Also if you play sanctioned events its nearly impossible to use toploaders as you can be accused for marked sleeves very easy (personally i play home magic only so i encourage myself playing with toploaders).
there is another solution. its cube, so its a casual format. why not just proxy the cards your worried about? sure, it doesn't look cool, but a bent up card worth 30$ or more isn't cool either.
The video was shot from one of our local stores. Most, if not all, Legacy and Vintage players I see in our local stores play with top loaders.
Riffle shuffling with top loaders is possible. It only needs practice.
I play with top loaders ever since I started playing competitive Magic. If you're not used to seeing a 60-card deck in top loaders, it seems overwhelming at first. But you'll get used to it. It really does protect your cards from players, who take out their frustrations on your cards. LOL! I myself bring 2 decks every time I go to play MTG. 120 cards in top loaders in a clutch bag. I think it weighs a kilo.
Here are some pictures of my pile of cards:
These are all of my cards that are currently in top loaders. If I'm not mistaken, that's a total of 381 cards not including the eight soldier tokens.
It seems like things are just getting silly now. Is the next thing going to be having every card in Beckett rated holders? Your cube would weigh about fifty pounds then.
there were some judges who posted quite clearly, that they wouldn´t allow a deck to be played in toploaders.
Toploaders are not strictly disallowed, due to the "or other protective devices" clause in section 3.10 of the tournament rules. However, where you run into trouble in Competitive and Professional REL is the requirement that your opponent be able to shuffle your deck. Given that all sleeves/protective devices are subject to the Head Judge's discretion, outside of regular REL you should probably not expect to be able to use toploaders.
At Regular REL, the most prominent complaint I have heard from judges against the toploaders is that the majority of them are transparent, and with so much wiggle room within, it's too easy to mark the deck by having key cards off-center.
The toploaders used in the video above were opaque though, and assuming the player could demonstrate an ability to shuffle them in a timely fashion, I would allow it.
I use to have this problem, I asked people to be careful a number of times, double sleeved and reminded them again and again. End of the day I just came to the conclusion that some people are just rougher with cards then others but I still wanted to play with them. My solution was to proxy the entire cube, the color prints cost about $30 on heavy card-stock and are fairly indistinguishable from normal cards when double sleeved. Now I dont overly care when I catch someone absentmindedly picking their teeth with a mox.
Firsthand experience: I sleeved one of my EDH decks in toploaders just for the lulz. I couldn't really shuffle it, so I threw my deck into a big bucket and just shook it a lot to get the cards mixed up. Whenever I needed to draw a card, I just closed my eyes and reached into the big bucket. Thankfully, I wasn't playing any tutors.
Seriously, though: don't do this. Toploaders is really overkill unless you're dealing with individual cards that are worth more than my student loans, like mondu_the_fat said. Your playgroup just needs to be more careful.
Congrats! I've still got a way to go
This made me laugh hard enough to actually post. I want to play EDH with you.
Does it bother people too much that top loaders are quite troublesome to use or that the cards that are housed using these are cheaper than the "student loan" posted by people here?
Really? If people can use top loaders well and want to use to protect their cards then who do you think you are to say which cards needed to be housed in top loaders?
(M:tG) It's a hobby which costs money. You can't play golf without the right clubs and a membership for the golf court, you can't play paintball with a cardboard armor and a sling, you can't go to the movies without paying for a ticket and you can't play Magic without owning the cards. Simple as that.
Imo, toploaders are for storage, and sleeves are for playing - and i would *Never* allow anyone to play in any tournament of which i am the HJ with toploaders on their deck - i dont care if you are playing Beta power and summer magic duals - your opponent is allowed to shuffle your deck (at Comp+ he is infact required to) and with toploaders that is not something that is easily done
So in short if you have a problem with your opponent shuffling your deck (in a variety of riffle and mash shuffles) you probably shouldnt be playing those cards in a tournament in the first place...
Also, if you chose to play with double sleeves, for gods sake bring exstra's i recently had a player who made a big fuss because his sleeves was marked, so he had to change them, but the store didnt sell his particular brand of "overcoat" sleeves, so he made a big fuzz about not wanting to damage his cards, and that i couldnt exspect him to play with regular single sleeves... in the end he was given the option between changing his sleeves and dropping - he chose the later...
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It's mostly because of the lack of care that my group has toward the cards. I'm overly cautious because of them.
Riffle shuffle like normal. Unless you have small hands, get half in each hand, then shuffle using your thumbs to control the rate with each pile falls. Resist the urge to just pile shuffle. If you do have small hands, divide the pile into 3 or 4 piles and then shuffle.
When I first switched to toploaders, some issues included chaffing my fingers from top loader edges, and in long tournaments your elbows will start to hurt. Practice is the only solution, really.
Note that quite a number of judges won't allow toploaders in sanctioned tournaments.
"Sometimes, the situation is outracing a threat, sometimes it's ignoring it, and sometimes it involves sideboarding in 4x Hope//Pray." --Doug Linn
I'm guessing pile shuffling and then rifle shuffling would probably be your best bet though.
One of my friends puts unsleaved cards in rubber bands. He pulled a Jace 2.0 and I just about died when I saw how he was treating it.
-Yogi Berra
I double sleeve my cube, and tell people to just take freaking care of my cards. I don't want to play with people who don't give a damn.
Edit:
Found some toploaders hanging around and put some of my cube in them:
This is just eight cards:
Even with only a very small amount of cards I could tell shuffling would be a pain in the butt using these. Holding just a regular hand of 7 cards with toploaders became tiresome very quickly.
Juju Alters - Altered MTG Cards
It's not really possible to play with toploaders. I would suggest that you tell your playgroup buddies to stop bending cards or stop playing. Double sleeves should be more than enough.
e: post 1000 get! :3
Cut the deck in two parts. Bring you hands together (thumbs touching). Lift up and let the two halves fall together.
Seriously, though: don't do this. Toploaders is really overkill unless you're dealing with individual cards that are worth more than my student loans, like mondu_the_fat said. Your playgroup just needs to be more careful.
Congrats! I've still got a way to go
Draft my Mono-Blue Cube!
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Teach them that they need to not break them. If they keep breaking them, find the people who are doing it and don't allow them to play unless they recoup you for replacement costs.
None of these methods ensure the safety of your cards and thats because of one simple term: friction. As long dirt exists it will catch up your cards and slowly destroy them as you shuffle (toploaders prevent that cause of the rigid plastic so your cards stay intact during shuffling).
If the pilot of the deck is reckless (means he bends cards, scratch his face with sleeves, drops cards off the table, has bad shuffling technic etc) then say goodbye to your precious foils/50$+ cards you spent your money last week.
Although using toploaders you sacrifice one major thing: comfort. Bigger decks (triple the normal size in height) means harder transport and managing. One plus here is that playing with topladers makes tap/untap and moving cards on board more fun and easier cause they slide a lot better.
Its a big dilemma cause if you own 5+ decks its a big issue toploading them cause you need a lot of space (you will watch your friend's deckboxes like holy grail or something).
Also if you play sanctioned events its nearly impossible to use toploaders as you can be accused for marked sleeves very easy (personally i play home magic only so i encourage myself playing with toploaders).
I have found some videos with guys playing in toploders and there is one where a guy riffle shuffles them: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0JBxZoJx4g&playnext=1&videos=ngEd0Dhrhn0
Hope i helped you. Enjoy your card life!
The video was shot from one of our local stores. Most, if not all, Legacy and Vintage players I see in our local stores play with top loaders.
Riffle shuffling with top loaders is possible. It only needs practice.
I play with top loaders ever since I started playing competitive Magic. If you're not used to seeing a 60-card deck in top loaders, it seems overwhelming at first. But you'll get used to it. It really does protect your cards from players, who take out their frustrations on your cards. LOL! I myself bring 2 decks every time I go to play MTG. 120 cards in top loaders in a clutch bag. I think it weighs a kilo.
Here are some pictures of my pile of cards:
These are all of my cards that are currently in top loaders. If I'm not mistaken, that's a total of 381 cards not including the eight soldier tokens.
These are the two decks I bring almost everyday.
RGW
Delver
RUG or UR
Stoneblade
UW
Toploaders are not strictly disallowed, due to the "or other protective devices" clause in section 3.10 of the tournament rules. However, where you run into trouble in Competitive and Professional REL is the requirement that your opponent be able to shuffle your deck. Given that all sleeves/protective devices are subject to the Head Judge's discretion, outside of regular REL you should probably not expect to be able to use toploaders.
At Regular REL, the most prominent complaint I have heard from judges against the toploaders is that the majority of them are transparent, and with so much wiggle room within, it's too easy to mark the deck by having key cards off-center.
The toploaders used in the video above were opaque though, and assuming the player could demonstrate an ability to shuffle them in a timely fashion, I would allow it.
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This made me laugh hard enough to actually post. I want to play EDH with you.
Really? If people can use top loaders well and want to use to protect their cards then who do you think you are to say which cards needed to be housed in top loaders?
So in short if you have a problem with your opponent shuffling your deck (in a variety of riffle and mash shuffles) you probably shouldnt be playing those cards in a tournament in the first place...
Also, if you chose to play with double sleeves, for gods sake bring exstra's i recently had a player who made a big fuss because his sleeves was marked, so he had to change them, but the store didnt sell his particular brand of "overcoat" sleeves, so he made a big fuzz about not wanting to damage his cards, and that i couldnt exspect him to play with regular single sleeves... in the end he was given the option between changing his sleeves and dropping - he chose the later...