MTG Salvation

One thing that I've always enjoyed doing is finding a sleeve that matches the flavor, general, or style of a particular deck. The problem is I maintain waaayy to many decks. (is that really a problem?)


In competitive tournaments I always prefer a specific inner and outer sleeve for my preferred feel and speed of shuffling (currently kmc hypermat + kmc inner). But in this format where I get to really tune a deck and put myself into each card selection, finding deck-appropriate sleeves really adds a bit of happiness for me.


For example I've been brewing a possible Pia Nalaar commander deck, and think that these HCD Dawn of Adventure sleeves would be fabulous to represent the deck


A few other decks with pretty appropriate sleeves I maintain are Chandra, Fire of Kaladesh is in those new Sriracha Ultra Pro sleeves, Latulla, Keldon Overseer is in HCD Song of Flame and Fury sleeves, Jeleva, Nephalia's Scourge is in HCD Daugther of Death sleeves, Jhoira of the Gitu is in HCD Aetherpunk Mage sleeves (cause its her!), Rakdos the Defiler is in those hyper shiny Max Protection Balrog sleeves, and so on. I've even had custom ink'ed sleeves made for a particular deck.


I doubt this is for everyone, but am I the only one? Does anyone else go out of their way to find specific sleeves for their deck, past just color-coordinating?

I used to get sleeves like these, but they all ended up peeling after just a few games. Of course, it was back during Shards of Alara and the only sleeves my local shop had was Ultra pro and they were $12 for 80 sleeves. Last ones I bought were Chandra Ablaze sleeves that I used for a deck focused on winning with Chandra Nalaar. I still have those sleeves in the Chandra deckbox I got when the Jace vs Chandra decks were new. Now I try to color coordinate my decks with Dragon Shields as they last much, much longer and don't peel.

I try to do the same, but it's hard finding sleeves that fit the theme well.

I tend to have my sleeves colours match their commander's (or at least one of the commander's colours in the case of multicolour), but every experience I've had of sleeves with pictures on them have ended up with wrecked sleeves after even just a few games.

I never do this with my decks. Most of the time I use a different color that clashes with my general.

My friend uses Grumpy Cat sleeves for his Kemba deck, though, so there's what I think this topic is looking for!

While not being essential i find it really flavorful to adjust storage to the flavor of my decks.

Since i maintain exactly 5 EDH Decks atm with all 5 colors represented in at least one of the decks i got myself the gorgeous Ultimate Guard Lands Edition Deck Boxes (including Dividers with the same Artwork). Ezuri, Renegade Leader is kept in the Forest one, Brago, King Eternal/Plains, Prossh, Skyraider of Kher/Swamp, Oona, Queen of the Fae/Island and Omnath, Locus of Rage/Mountain.
I got 5 D20 in said colors to keep track of life depending on what deck i'm playing.

Double sleeves will be next, but i'm unsure what to get, yet. I'll go Dragon Shields either matte or glare back without Artwork prints. Feedback about shuffling and toughness would be great.

Nearly all of my decks are in solid color dragon shield sleeves. I try to make the sleeves to the color/concept of the deck. Mono-color is easy, and artifact decks fit well with brown sleeves in my opinion. My morph focused deck is in silver sleeves due to the colorless focus.

The difficulty is in multicolor, and I had wanted to find sleeves with the Ravnica guild symbols on them for the two-color combinations. Unfortunately, these do not seem to be licensed as they do not seem to exist.

Quote from BlackVise »

If you want to use sleeves with cool designs but are worried about peeling, I suggest KMC Character Guard sleeves - they're slightly larger than regular sleeves so that you can fit your sleeved cards inside them, protecting the design from peeling.

They are phenomenal. The new hypermat cover sleeves are my new favorite. Ultra Pro has also started a series of these with one having silver Celtic knots, and another with pretty gold sharp jagged edges for the external design. Custom sleeves from inkedgaming all also recommend using outer sleeves, and I think currently they offer just a plain ultra pro outer layer.

If a deck I own ends up being over $1k in value then i tend to use these in addition to normal double sleeves. It causes my decks to stand abnormally tall. I can still shuffle them since I'm a bigger guy and used to it, but a lot of my friends don't like to borrow triple sleeved decks. It also is an easy out for a random phallic/overcompensation joke.

My only complaint is that these outer layers tend to appear foggy (and gross) after a few weeks of play. This may be due to them being (mostly) all clear, and showing every bit of dirt that normal sleeves hide, but I've noticed both the Ultra Pro and KMC gold+solver border ones showing signs of use fairly quickly. I haven't played with the new hypermat ones enough to see if they are fogging as quickly. But since it is easier to import these in bulk it means that I can continue to use exotic holographic sleeves like the Commander Arsenal Planeswalker / Kaalia / etc without fear of them degrading.


edit; back on topic, when I'm not after some artwork to help depict a deck I tend to default to purple/black/red colors. Mono red decks in black sleeves, black decks in red sleeves, blue decks in purple. Dimir and Grixis decks also feel right in purple sleeves too.

Other than getting colors to compliment my color identity, the only deck I've done this with is Child of Alara. The sleeves on my Child deck have a nuclear explosion that says "BOOM" on them. I bet you didn't know Child was a DFC creature, did you?

I never really bothered with sleeves that fit the theme. Though with pro matte I have gone with color similarity (teal for simic. Red for purphoros. Purple for izzet)

My brother bough zombie theme sleeved for his thrax deck.

I sleeved my mono red dragon commander deck in red dragonshields

I am inconsistant sometimes I do match sometimes I don't. I like the colour green as a colour and not as a magic colour so I have plenty of green sleves and few green decks and with things like standard the deck rotates out but the sleeves remain useful.

I'm about as far from this as you can get. Everything in my box is in orange dragon shields, so every deck I own is in orange dragon shields.

I do have color coordinated tokens sleeved up. I had a bunch of old sleeves kicking around after consolidating and wanted my tokens differentiated from regular cards somehow.

I do the same for my EDH deck in my sig. I really only care to have this one... which is basically me as a magic player, so everything is super themed. the deck is halloween, the spindown is shadowmoor dice, I've been working on a new playmat for it, the sleeves are pumpkin themed, and I've even added a section on the primer with all the alters or themed bits that go with it, like acrylic candy/sppoky 1/1 counters.

Only issue is to really do "themed sleeves" you have to do inked gaming custom sleeves and they are so expensive right now.