So I've seen a lot of answers to questions about playmats along the lines of "they keep the sleeves clean". What I'd like to know is where are you playing that things get so dirty? My LGS has clean tables. I wouldn't want to play at any LGS that didn't, playmat or not.
If you play with sleeves for like a year you can see that a lot of dust, mixed with sweet will accumulate on them in form of mostly "gray" or "black" dirt. You can remove it from time to time, but its just more work and some might just buy new sleeves instead / which then is work to sleeve your deck again ; and if you like some particular sleeves, you might just use a playmat to keep them around for longer.
Its totally normal, as humans will always have some form of sweet on their hands.
Shuffling cards, putting them on the table to play, tapping them, all of that will just swoosh up all the dust and dirt on a table, which is all very small and not visible, but theres no way around it, unless your store cleans all the tables with water and cleaner every day (which most stores wont do, as they dont really get visible dirty).
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Thats just the normal dirt.
Some stores dont have a lot of tables around all the time and just use some ale-bench or other cheap tables if a bigger tournament fires (draft, prerelease etc.).
So these tables wont be totally clean, but not to a degree anybody would call dirty, but they naturally accumulate dust over time.
If the tables are made out of wood or some material that might have a surface that produces scratches if a player moves the card over it, its also something that will possible damage a sleeve or even "mark" it in heavy cases. All of that wont be an issue on itself, but it all adds up.
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Moving / tapping cards on a playmat is usually easier, and if you use a good color pattern its also better to identify cards (black cards on a black table are almost "invisible").
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And of course some stores simply allow food, drinks and other stuff that will just immediately have an negative impact on cards ; but in that case your playmat will get dirty too, which is bad too.
I play at a buddy's house where several of the guys smoke. (Most of them vape anymore, but whatever..)
I can recall occasions where we were playing a sealed event and I discovered little black spots/deposits on my cards before we even began the second round of matches. As in, I had just opened them in boosters less than an hour before.. Quite gross.
It doesn't take much, apparently. I recommend playmats highly--(double) sleeves, too.
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Its totally normal, as humans will always have some form of sweet on their hands.
Shuffling cards, putting them on the table to play, tapping them, all of that will just swoosh up all the dust and dirt on a table, which is all very small and not visible, but theres no way around it, unless your store cleans all the tables with water and cleaner every day (which most stores wont do, as they dont really get visible dirty).
----
Thats just the normal dirt.
Some stores dont have a lot of tables around all the time and just use some ale-bench or other cheap tables if a bigger tournament fires (draft, prerelease etc.).
So these tables wont be totally clean, but not to a degree anybody would call dirty, but they naturally accumulate dust over time.
If the tables are made out of wood or some material that might have a surface that produces scratches if a player moves the card over it, its also something that will possible damage a sleeve or even "mark" it in heavy cases. All of that wont be an issue on itself, but it all adds up.
----
Moving / tapping cards on a playmat is usually easier, and if you use a good color pattern its also better to identify cards (black cards on a black table are almost "invisible").
----
And of course some stores simply allow food, drinks and other stuff that will just immediately have an negative impact on cards ; but in that case your playmat will get dirty too, which is bad too.
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I can recall occasions where we were playing a sealed event and I discovered little black spots/deposits on my cards before we even began the second round of matches. As in, I had just opened them in boosters less than an hour before.. Quite gross.
It doesn't take much, apparently. I recommend playmats highly--(double) sleeves, too.