There was also the problem of making decks, sleeving them, and then putting them back into the boxes after I am done with the deck. Or sometimes I would have a favorite deck, and would need to swap out the sleeves from time to time in order to keep the deck fresh.
Now, I could have just sleeved up all the cards with the same sleeves that I use to build decks with, but then I would still have that issue with re-sleeving the deck after a while. Or what if I wanted to build a Cube and needed different sleeves for those? I would have to re-sleeve all the cards just to get them into the Cube sleeves, and then re-sleeve cards once I rotated them out of the Cube. I know this because I actually started this process and found it to be very expensive and not the right solution I really wanted.
Yes those are a bunch of UltraPro Matted Black sleeves that I bought just for this process. I was actually beginning to follow this process before I figured out it would not work.
After some research and help from the Professor with his videos, I came up with the next plan. KMC Perfect Fit sleeves!
Now, the KMC Perfect Fit sleeves will come 100 sleeves to a pack. Then 30 packs to a case. Normally you can get them at an LGS for $5-$6 a pack. With that in mind, and since I am not an LGS and I can't order from a distributor, I am looking at paying LGS prices. So, the next best thing I could think of was Amazon, but those deals would come and go, and there was no real static price I could count on. It would be possible, but for the volume I was looking for it would have taken me a very long time just to get the sleeves at reasonable prices.
This brings me to the plan I executed. I went to my LGS, and asked them if they could order me 2 cases of KMC Perfect Sleeves. They said sure and would let me know when they were in. When they got in, I got a call and went down there and picked them up. When I got there, there were 8 of these cases and they said they had another 4 coming in at a later date! To my surprise I was getting a lot more than I expected. But I guess the distributor said that is what they called a case. Almost like they thought 1 case would equal 6 of these boxes.
I had asked them to order them, so I paid up. I believe I paid $150 a case, and ended up paying around $1200 for the sleeves. That was around $5.00 per pack. I was not expecting to have to pay for so much at one time, but if I was going to do it I might as well get it done.
As you can see, and I am pretty sure you can watch one of the professor's videos, but the sleeve fits really snug to the card itself, and allows you to double sleeve a deck. This would solve all my issues with sleeves. I could build a deck, tear it down, re-sleeve, use different sleeves for different decks, and to be honest it was the most perfect solution. Just wish it did not cost so much.
Let's talk about complete costs to do this type of thing for me.
In my collection I have around 88,000 cards.
1 pack = 100 sleeves
30 packs = 1 case
1 case = 3000 sleeves
That means I would need to buy over 29 cases of sleeves just to get to all my cards. And at $5 a pack, for 53 cases, that adds up to $4,350.00 just for sleeves....
$4,350 dollars for condoms for cardboard, so that the other condoms don't ruin the cardboard.
Now that we have that disgusting number out there, how in the world would I tackle it? As it stands, I already bought 8 cases of sleeves, I never did get the other 4 that were still coming in, but I did not mind because I was already over my head in sleeves. So that is $4350 - $1200 = $3150 left to go. And considering the amount of sleeves I have now, I figured it would take me quite a while to go through them all.
It did take me a while, but still not long enough. What do I mean about that? I was thinking it would have taken me a year to go through them all, but it was only around 6 months, and I had not planned on these purchases in my yearly budget, so I was pulling from a different bucket outside of my Magic yearly budget. That kind of sucked. I know, I know... I could have just stopped sleeving, but I really didn't want to because of just being able to get it done.
The way I did it, was I took a Fat Pack box and put three KMC packs in it. Then I filled it up with cards / dividers that needed to be sleeved. That normally ended up being around 300 cards. Some of the cards were in older sleeves, or other sleeves but it ended up being just the right amount to use up all the KMC sleeves. I could then have enough room for the KMC sleeved cards, card dividers, and the extra old sleeves back into the Fat Pack and bring it home.
I would normally fill up the box, bring it into work, and it would take me about an hour to finish up 300 cards. I would normally do this while I was on a conference call, or my lunch.
With the math 88,000 cards should have taken me around 293 days, but I think I was finished closer to 150 days. Toward the end of the Modern cards I kind of went nuts and just did a bunch of sleeves on some PTO I used up.
I started with my Vintage / Legacy cards, then I moved into the Modern. I ended up with Standard next, but some sets came out while I was doing this, so it was much easier because I did all new sets as they came out. I wasn't going to do the basic lands, but I started getting the Un-set lands, A/B/U lands and other special lands and just kept going.
I have also sleeved up all my foil cards, even though I might trade my extra foils away. I will just keep the sleeve and put it in a trading sleeve. I just do this to minimize the warping.
So let's get back to the cost of the sleeves. With my LGS I would consider myself as a power buyer. I get all my sealed product and they are the first stop when I am looking for singles. So what happened was I kept calling in asking for more and more cases. The more I ordered the lower the price got. I think my last order of 10 cases ended up being $4.25 per pack. So really I was paying $127.50 a case. Now that might not be much, but it is a very good price considering if I bought each of the pack directly from the stock of the LGS it would have been around $6.00 a pack.
So either I have a really awesome LGS, or you could get this type of deal if you plan on spending a lot of money with your LGS for little cardboard plastic condoms.
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