I just got 1000 KMC hyper Matte sleeves an 800 perfect fit these are some beautiful sleeves
Hopefully the batch your sleeves came from is better than mine. I sleeved my cube in black KMC Hyper Mattes and Perfect Fits last year. They are possibly the worst quality sleeves I've ever had. They feel great to shuffle, but it seems we split several every time we have a cube night. The corners hold up, but they're bad to split across the bottom.
Got this box in my charity shop like 4 or 5 years ago, not long after I started my cube. It has done very well; it holds all my cards, lands, tokens and a bag of dice/counters. It keeps everything tight enough that the don't move about to much in transport, but when you need the cards out you just remove the lands box and the rest come right out. I am so used to it now I can see my cube being housed in anything else, and the best part is I paid no more than £5 for it.
If you need a nice storage option(or generally anything in life) hit up your local charity shop, all the best things come from charity shops.
I bit the bullet today and ordered Ultra Pro Eclipse sleeves to resleeve the cube. I used them on my deck at Eternal Weekend and really liked their shuffle feel. I've been extremely unhappy with the KMC Hyper Mattes that I'm currently using. It was very disappointing after hearing and reading such high praise for them that they turned out to be absolute trash. I'm hoping the Eclipse sleeves will at least hold up better. We bust a few KMCs every time we draft.
I've had my cube sleeved in black KMC hyper mattes w/ KMC perfect fits for probably the last 24-30 months or so, and I can't even remember the last time we split a sleeve. They've been fantastic.
But from what I understand, they've changed their process over the past year or so, and they suck now. I'll likely switch to perfect hards w/ Dragon Shields the next time I re-sleeve.
I've had my cube sleeved in black KMC hyper mattes w/ KMC perfect fits for probably the last 24-30 months or so, and I can't even remember the last time we split a sleeve. They've been fantastic.
But from what I understand, they've changed their process over the past year or so, and they suck now. I'll likely switch to perfect hards w/ Dragon Shields the next time I re-sleeve.
Yeah, I did a bit of research on the "best quality sleeves" before I bought enough sleeves for the whole cube. Everywhere I looked the KMC Hypers were getting fantastic reviews. Reddit loved them. People here loved them. The Professor had them ranked at number one on his list and I watched his video where he really put them through the ringer with the stretch test. I had KMC Mattes (not Hypers) on before and they were really good. We'd split one every now and then, but not often, so I fully expected the Hypers to be just as good or better. They shuffle well and feel really good in your hands, but they split like crazy across the bottom. The corners seem to hold up, but I'd be willing to bet that a good third of my cube right now has sleeves that are fully split across the bottom and most of the rest starting to splt. We've had so many split that I'm now out of extra sleeves, which is why I'm buying sleeves. It's been less than two years (last Feb) since we last sleeved, which feels like an incredibly short time considering the amount of money and time it takes to sleeve an entire cube. The original KMC Mattes are now on my secondary cube and still going strong after probably five years or so of use. I'm hoping the Eclipse sleeves hold up to long term use. They look and feel great, I just don't know about their longevity.
For reference this is what's happening. This defeats the purpose of double sleeving in the first place.
I've had my cube sleeved in black KMC hyper mattes w/ KMC perfect fits for probably the last 24-30 months or so, and I can't even remember the last time we split a sleeve. They've been fantastic.
But from what I understand, they've changed their process over the past year or so, and they suck now. I'll likely switch to perfect hards w/ Dragon Shields the next time I re-sleeve.
Yeah, I did a bit of research on the "best quality sleeves" before I bought enough sleeves for the whole cube. Everywhere I looked the KMC Hypers were getting fantastic reviews. Reddit loved them. People here loved them. The Professor had them ranked at number one on his list and I watched his video where he really put them through the ringer with the stretch test. I had KMC Mattes (not Hypers) on before and they were really good. We'd split one every now and then, but not often, so I fully expected the Hypers to be just as good or better. They shuffle well and feel really good in your hands, but they split like crazy across the bottom. The corners seem to hold up, but I'd be willing to bet that a good third of my cube right now has sleeves that are fully split across the bottom and most of the rest starting to splt. We've had so many split that I'm now out of extra sleeves, which is why I'm buying sleeves. It's been less than two years (last Feb) since we last sleeved, which feels like an incredibly short time considering the amount of money and time it takes to sleeve an entire cube. The original KMC Mattes are now on my secondary cube and still going strong after probably five years or so of use. I'm hoping the Eclipse sleeves hold up to long term use. They look and feel great, I just don't know about their longevity.
For reference this is what's happening. This defeats the purpose of double sleeving in the first place.
Wow... that's bad.
A possibility occurred to me. Maybe the equipment used to make the sleeves is too old and worn out?
Those machines wear out like anything else. So while they might pass some initial QC test or sit within some define operating parameters, enough of those numbers might be off just enough to degrade the overall quality of the final product. Not the first time that happened.
A possibility occurred to me. Maybe the equipment used to make the sleeves is too old and worn out?
Those machines wear out like anything else. So while they might pass some initial QC test or sit within some define operating parameters, enough of those numbers might be off just enough to degrade the overall quality of the final product. Not the first time that happened.
I believe KMC was purchased by a different parent company, but they kept all the same branding. Because of that it seems that this parent company has tried to cut costs in some ways and changed the formula. The sleeves themselves still feel really well and the corners hold up great, but it seems the glue they are using just isn't holding up like it used to.
A possibility occurred to me. Maybe the equipment used to make the sleeves is too old and worn out?
Those machines wear out like anything else. So while they might pass some initial QC test or sit within some define operating parameters, enough of those numbers might be off just enough to degrade the overall quality of the final product. Not the first time that happened.
I believe KMC was purchased by a different parent company, but they kept all the same branding. Because of that it seems that this parent company has tried to cut costs in some ways and changed the formula. The sleeves themselves still feel really well and the corners hold up great, but it seems the glue they are using just isn't holding up like it used to.
The edges on sleeves are heat treated or, more accurately, welded. No glue is involved.
Been reading this thread for a while now, following the discussion about cube storage. In the near future, I might be resleeving my cube too, and I'll be sure to check the latest update here.
I've had a 585-card unpowered commander-themed cube for a year or two and up to now, and have been storing it in a simple, very dull cardboard box. I've been thinking of making my own wooden box, but stumbled across a product that I didn't read about here up till know and didn't know it exists, so I thought I'd share the box I recently bought:
We don't cube draft very often and I hardly ever use it for transportation, so the quality should do for me. It holds all 585 cards, plus some 500 lands and a load of tokens, extra boosters for Lore Seeker, about 50 small dice and there's still a bit of room to spare. I'm very happy with it!
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A hobby is by defenition something you're not any good at - otherwise it'd have been your work. Magic is my biggest hobby so I mustn't be very good at it.
I've read mixed reviews on the CUB3, but if you don't travel with your cube and don't move it often, it seems to be a really cool option. I think The Professor did a review video on it.
We got our first draft in after sleeving in the Eclipse sleeves and the look and feel great. The only negative that I'd give them is there are some sizing inconsistencies. I haven't actually gone through and counted to get the numbers and percentage, but just eyeballing, I'd say it's probably somewhere between 20-40 sleeves that were a bit taller than the rest. That's out of 10 total packs, 8 of which were in the same unopened box. The taller sleeves were random throughout and not just from the two packs I bought separate. That's a bit of a bummer.
Been reading this thread for a while now, following the discussion about cube storage. In the near future, I might be resleeving my cube too, and I'll be sure to check the latest update here.
I've had a 585-card unpowered commander-themed cube for a year or two and up to now, and have been storing it in a simple, very dull cardboard box. I've been thinking of making my own wooden box, but stumbled across a product that I didn't read about here up till know and didn't know it exists, so I thought I'd share the box I recently bought:
We don't cube draft very often and I hardly ever use it for transportation, so the quality should do for me. It holds all 585 cards, plus some 500 lands and a load of tokens, extra boosters for Lore Seeker, about 50 small dice and there's still a bit of room to spare. I'm very happy with it!
I got to see the CUB3 from my LGS where I host cube nights, and it looked and felt... awful. It's just cardboard.
I mean, as you say, if you're not moving it much it'll probably be fine, but I'd still vastly prefer to keep using $2 BCS longboxes and spending my other $60 on beer and foil cards.
Been reading this thread for a while now, following the discussion about cube storage. In the near future, I might be resleeving my cube too, and I'll be sure to check the latest update here.
I've had a 585-card unpowered commander-themed cube for a year or two and up to now, and have been storing it in a simple, very dull cardboard box. I've been thinking of making my own wooden box, but stumbled across a product that I didn't read about here up till know and didn't know it exists, so I thought I'd share the box I recently bought:
We don't cube draft very often and I hardly ever use it for transportation, so the quality should do for me. It holds all 585 cards, plus some 500 lands and a load of tokens, extra boosters for Lore Seeker, about 50 small dice and there's still a bit of room to spare. I'm very happy with it!
I got to see the CUB3 from my LGS where I host cube nights, and it looked and felt... awful. It's just cardboard.
I mean, as you say, if you're not moving it much it'll probably be fine, but I'd still vastly prefer to keep using $2 BCS longboxes and spending my other $60 on beer and foil cards.
$60?! I thought you were lying until I checked the URL. The MSRP IS $89.99! Are you kidding? For $90 Am I reading those measurements right too? 8 1/2" square?
Yeah, it isn't cheap. And it's cardboard. And there are better options, probably. And if I find time, I might make an exact wooden replica of this. But I'm quite satisfied with it for now :P.
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A hobby is by defenition something you're not any good at - otherwise it'd have been your work. Magic is my biggest hobby so I mustn't be very good at it.
I recently re-sleeved my Un-cube in black Matte Dragon Shields. Cube itself is around 600 cards, with things like the basic lands, the non-basic land "draft pool" and the contraptions/conspiracies/augments adding another 350ish total to that count. I had heard rumors that old dragon shields were often miscut and bad to buy in such quantities, but after having re-sleeved it, I found nothing of the sort. They shuffle nicely and I know as a veteran commander player that they will hold up really well to everyday use.
I know they have a tendency to get a little dirty, as they get junk stuck to them a lot, but we'll see how it goes. They are a huge improvement over the crappy ultrapro mattes I had on them before.
So I'm in the process of making some iron on decals for these cloth boosters my wife is sewing for me. I'm trying to find all of the artwork in magic that depicts a cube.
So far I've only found:
After months of transferring my card collection from binders to double sleeving and in boxes (I have G and R left to do). It's a long boring process. Saw lots of movies on Netflix...
I started eyeing my collection stored in top loaders. Some very large percentage I really can't articulate are stored in single penny sleeves, or the heavier duty playing card sleeves, then placed in top loaders. All new Ultra Pro products, nothing recycled. I didn't have a ton of choices between 1995 and 2000.
Last night, I pulled a high dollar, NM card and noticed an oily residue inside the card sleeve. I'm a stickler about not eating around my cards (always have been) and washing my hands. The oily residue shouldn't be there and certainly not inside the sleeves. Tonight I'll spot check my collection, but I made a decision. I'm pulling my entire collection out of top loaders if I find just one other card with the oily residue. I think that is very likely. I don't care if the card is worth $50 or $1000. They're coming out.
My suspicion points back to Ultra Pro and, more specifically, their use of PVC or whatever it is.
Before I go any further, why did I use Ultra Pro? The short answer is, that's a brand that is universally available nearly everywhere. In 1995, there wasn't any other brand most shops would sell (the concept of LGS didn't take hold yet so nearly all card shops were actually sports or comic book oriented and sold sleeves accordingly) Fast forward to 2018 and the scenery is much improved. Dragon Shield, KMC, BCW, etc can be found at some merchants but Ultra Pro is found at nearly all of them. This an especially important factor if you find your sleeves splitting or marked and you need new ones 10 minutes ago.
So looking back at Ultra Pro this is what is said on their website regarding deck protectors.
Quote from
Solid color Deck Protectors with Ultra PRO's hologram quality seal. Clear side uses non-glare matte material for softer feel and smoother shuffle. Stores and protects standard sized cards. 100-count pack. All Ultra PRO Deck Protectors are archival-safe and acid-free.
So far so good... this is their product blurb for one of their top loaders
3" x 4" (63.5mm x 88.9mm) regular toploader for standard size and thickness cards. Rigid plastic encloses card and keeps it clean while preventing damage. Packs of 25.
What's missing?
KMC has this to say on their FAQ about their products.
Are KMC Sleeves safe for my cards?
Yes, all KMC Sleeves are PVC and Acid free. They are made from "High Impact Polyproylene"
Not exactly sure what defines "high impact". A flea? Anyways, AWESOME! Except they don't appear to sell hard top loaders. Bummer.
Dragon Shield is the same, archival safe. Nothing about high impact though. Unfortunately, no top loaders!
How about BCW? They're interesting. I can confirm their penny sleeves are archival safe having handled their packs but their site makes no mention of it. Unfortunately at the time of this posting their site won't load the top loader information but I'm reasonably sure they are "archival-safe" PVC. Interesting if true, I would like to see what they're using for a plasticizer.
I hope to find a reasonably costed substitute for the ridged top loaders. But in the meantime, tonight will be the first night I begin extracting my cards from their top loaders, re-sleeving, and sending the plastic junk to the recyclers.
So I'm in the process of making some iron on decals for these cloth boosters my wife is sewing for me. I'm trying to find all of the artwork in magic that depicts a cube.
So far I've only found:
Hopefully the batch your sleeves came from is better than mine. I sleeved my cube in black KMC Hyper Mattes and Perfect Fits last year. They are possibly the worst quality sleeves I've ever had. They feel great to shuffle, but it seems we split several every time we have a cube night. The corners hold up, but they're bad to split across the bottom.
MTGS Average Peasant Cube 2023 Edition
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Got this box in my charity shop like 4 or 5 years ago, not long after I started my cube. It has done very well; it holds all my cards, lands, tokens and a bag of dice/counters. It keeps everything tight enough that the don't move about to much in transport, but when you need the cards out you just remove the lands box and the rest come right out. I am so used to it now I can see my cube being housed in anything else, and the best part is I paid no more than £5 for it.
If you need a nice storage option(or generally anything in life) hit up your local charity shop, all the best things come from charity shops.
MTGS Average Peasant Cube 2023 Edition
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But from what I understand, they've changed their process over the past year or so, and they suck now. I'll likely switch to perfect hards w/ Dragon Shields the next time I re-sleeve.
My 630 Card Powered Cube
My Article - "Cube Design Philosophy"
My Article - "Mana Short: A study in limited resource management."
My 49th Set (P)review - Discusses my top 20 Cube cards from MKM!
Yeah, I did a bit of research on the "best quality sleeves" before I bought enough sleeves for the whole cube. Everywhere I looked the KMC Hypers were getting fantastic reviews. Reddit loved them. People here loved them. The Professor had them ranked at number one on his list and I watched his video where he really put them through the ringer with the stretch test. I had KMC Mattes (not Hypers) on before and they were really good. We'd split one every now and then, but not often, so I fully expected the Hypers to be just as good or better. They shuffle well and feel really good in your hands, but they split like crazy across the bottom. The corners seem to hold up, but I'd be willing to bet that a good third of my cube right now has sleeves that are fully split across the bottom and most of the rest starting to splt. We've had so many split that I'm now out of extra sleeves, which is why I'm buying sleeves. It's been less than two years (last Feb) since we last sleeved, which feels like an incredibly short time considering the amount of money and time it takes to sleeve an entire cube. The original KMC Mattes are now on my secondary cube and still going strong after probably five years or so of use. I'm hoping the Eclipse sleeves hold up to long term use. They look and feel great, I just don't know about their longevity.
For reference this is what's happening. This defeats the purpose of double sleeving in the first place.
MTGS Average Peasant Cube 2023 Edition
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Wow... that's bad.
A possibility occurred to me. Maybe the equipment used to make the sleeves is too old and worn out?
Those machines wear out like anything else. So while they might pass some initial QC test or sit within some define operating parameters, enough of those numbers might be off just enough to degrade the overall quality of the final product. Not the first time that happened.
I believe KMC was purchased by a different parent company, but they kept all the same branding. Because of that it seems that this parent company has tried to cut costs in some ways and changed the formula. The sleeves themselves still feel really well and the corners hold up great, but it seems the glue they are using just isn't holding up like it used to.
I definitely will. I have high hopes for them.
MTGS Average Peasant Cube 2023 Edition
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The edges on sleeves are heat treated or, more accurately, welded. No glue is involved.
Been reading this thread for a while now, following the discussion about cube storage. In the near future, I might be resleeving my cube too, and I'll be sure to check the latest update here.
I've had a 585-card unpowered commander-themed cube for a year or two and up to now, and have been storing it in a simple, very dull cardboard box. I've been thinking of making my own wooden box, but stumbled across a product that I didn't read about here up till know and didn't know it exists, so I thought I'd share the box I recently bought:
http://www.ultrapro.com/product_info.php?products_id=3115
We don't cube draft very often and I hardly ever use it for transportation, so the quality should do for me. It holds all 585 cards, plus some 500 lands and a load of tokens, extra boosters for Lore Seeker, about 50 small dice and there's still a bit of room to spare. I'm very happy with it!
We got our first draft in after sleeving in the Eclipse sleeves and the look and feel great. The only negative that I'd give them is there are some sizing inconsistencies. I haven't actually gone through and counted to get the numbers and percentage, but just eyeballing, I'd say it's probably somewhere between 20-40 sleeves that were a bit taller than the rest. That's out of 10 total packs, 8 of which were in the same unopened box. The taller sleeves were random throughout and not just from the two packs I bought separate. That's a bit of a bummer.
MTGS Average Peasant Cube 2023 Edition
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My 630 Card Powered Cube
My Article - "Cube Design Philosophy"
My Article - "Mana Short: A study in limited resource management."
My 49th Set (P)review - Discusses my top 20 Cube cards from MKM!
I got to see the CUB3 from my LGS where I host cube nights, and it looked and felt... awful. It's just cardboard.
I mean, as you say, if you're not moving it much it'll probably be fine, but I'd still vastly prefer to keep using $2 BCS longboxes and spending my other $60 on beer and foil cards.
$60?! I thought you were lying until I checked the URL. The MSRP IS $89.99! Are you kidding? For $90 Am I reading those measurements right too? 8 1/2" square?
I know they have a tendency to get a little dirty, as they get junk stuck to them a lot, but we'll see how it goes. They are a huge improvement over the crappy ultrapro mattes I had on them before.
So far I've only found:
Are there any others you know of? I'm going to try and find as many as I can and put those decals as the artwork on each booster sleeve.
MTGS Average Peasant Cube 2023 Edition
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I started eyeing my collection stored in top loaders. Some very large percentage I really can't articulate are stored in single penny sleeves, or the heavier duty playing card sleeves, then placed in top loaders. All new Ultra Pro products, nothing recycled. I didn't have a ton of choices between 1995 and 2000.
Last night, I pulled a high dollar, NM card and noticed an oily residue inside the card sleeve. I'm a stickler about not eating around my cards (always have been) and washing my hands. The oily residue shouldn't be there and certainly not inside the sleeves. Tonight I'll spot check my collection, but I made a decision. I'm pulling my entire collection out of top loaders if I find just one other card with the oily residue. I think that is very likely. I don't care if the card is worth $50 or $1000. They're coming out.
My suspicion points back to Ultra Pro and, more specifically, their use of PVC or whatever it is.
Before I go any further, why did I use Ultra Pro? The short answer is, that's a brand that is universally available nearly everywhere. In 1995, there wasn't any other brand most shops would sell (the concept of LGS didn't take hold yet so nearly all card shops were actually sports or comic book oriented and sold sleeves accordingly) Fast forward to 2018 and the scenery is much improved. Dragon Shield, KMC, BCW, etc can be found at some merchants but Ultra Pro is found at nearly all of them. This an especially important factor if you find your sleeves splitting or marked and you need new ones 10 minutes ago.
So looking back at Ultra Pro this is what is said on their website regarding deck protectors.
So far so good... this is their product blurb for one of their top loaders
What's missing?
KMC has this to say on their FAQ about their products.
Not exactly sure what defines "high impact". A flea? Anyways, AWESOME! Except they don't appear to sell hard top loaders. Bummer.
Dragon Shield is the same, archival safe. Nothing about high impact though. Unfortunately, no top loaders!
How about BCW? They're interesting. I can confirm their penny sleeves are archival safe having handled their packs but their site makes no mention of it. Unfortunately at the time of this posting their site won't load the top loader information but I'm reasonably sure they are "archival-safe" PVC. Interesting if true, I would like to see what they're using for a plasticizer.
I hope to find a reasonably costed substitute for the ridged top loaders. But in the meantime, tonight will be the first night I begin extracting my cards from their top loaders, re-sleeving, and sending the plastic junk to the recyclers.
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