The two layers that
actually touch the card.

Card stock, printed and coated, made to twelve points — twelve thousandths of an inch, about a third of a millimetre. Every other layer on this page exists for this one, and it is the only layer you cannot replace.

Sized to the card itself rather than to a category, which is why it is called that and why it goes on first. It adds almost nothing to the stack and stops almost nothing on its own. What it does is seal the card off from the sleeve that will actually take the wear.

Cut larger on purpose. This is the layer that gets handled, shuffled, scuffed and replaced, and it is meant to be treated as consumable. A sleeve that still looks new after a year in a deck is a sleeve that was never doing anything.

The reason a rated holder takes a sleeved card at all. Fit is not “does it go in” — it is how much room is left once it has. Too tight abrades the sleeve; too loose lets the card travel, and travel is what rounds a corner.

Rated by the same points the card is measured in: thirty-five for an ordinary card, and higher ratings for the thick ones — relics, patches, anything with something embedded in it. Putting a normal card in a holder rated for a thick one is the commonest way to give it room it should not have.

The sleeve mouth flares slightly rather than lying flat against the card. It is going on under tension, and the corner is taking that tension every time it moves.

Tip it and something shifts. A card that can travel inside its holder is a card being sanded very slowly at two corners, and it will look fine right up until it does not.

A packed row of sleeved cards that bows in the middle is under compression at the ends, and compression is the one kind of damage that leaves no mark until it is permanent.