Micro-review: Great (arguably the best) inner sleeves, less good as outer sleeves. Full review follows. The first thing you should know about me is that I am obsessive about the condition and storage of any perishable item I have. I'm the sort of person who buys plastic covers for my paperback books and plastic boxes to store board game components in. I laminate stuff with my serious face on. I have many boardgamer friends and I have the reputation for being the careful one, to put it politely. I recently started playing Magic: The Gathering again, after a break of 19 years. I still have some of my old cards and lament that decent protective sleeves were not around at the time to protect them properly. One of my first pieces of research on returning to the game was how to protect the cards really well, and that led me to (obsessively) double-sleeve my cards. Specifically, I use a tightly-fitting inner sleeve on all cards, then add the outer sleeve to play them. So naturally I need to know what the best sleeves are (inner and outer). I have used two other brands of "perfect fit" or "precise fit" sleeves - KMC and Ultra Pro. I will write more about those in their own product entries, but to summarise the KMC sleeves are excellent but can be a little bit too tight and bend cards, while the Ultra Pros are awful (surprisingly, as Ultra Pro make excellent kit generally), being far too tight to use. KMC had become my staple inner sleeve and I will mainly be comparing the Ultimate Guard Precise Fit sleeves against them as a result. Two things struck me immediately about the Ultimate Guard Precise Fit sleeves - firstly, the sleeves have a lovely quality and feeling about them but are slightly thicker than the KMCs, and secondly, the finish on the edges of the sleeves can be a little rough. I was concerned at first that the thickness over the KMCs would significantly exacerbate the issue that sleeved cards require more storage space, but some simple testing with a deck of 60 cards showed that the thickness difference was much less significant in terms of storage space - perhaps a millimetre or two extra between the KMCs and the Ultimate Guards. That extra thickness is well spent though - the Ultimate Guards feel beautifully smooth and solid compared to the KMCs so I consider this a win for the Ultimate Guard sleeves. The roughness around the edges doesn't effect all the sleeves and doesn't impact the function of the sleeves to protect cards, simply creating something of a sharp/rough edge - they are literally "rough around the edges" sometimes. The finish on the KMCs is definitely better. The sizing on these sleeves is best in class when sleeving a Magic the Gathering card - the Ultimate Guard have managed to come up with a wonderfully-consistent sizing and I get little-to-no bending from overtight sleeves such as I often see on the KMC (and to the point of unusability on Ultra Pros). The cards slide in easily right to the end. One other aspect of sizing is slightly negative - the length of the sleeve is *exactly* the same as that of a standard Magic the Gathering card, so there is a tendency for a very, very fine sliver of the card to be exposed at the open end (the bottom, if you are double-sleeving) - particularly if you are exploiting your children to sleeve cards for you. By comparison the KMCs are a couple of millimetres longer than an MTG card, creating a lip of empty sleeve at the open end. This is a trade-off - it reduces the value of the Ultimate Guards as a single sleeve as there is a chance of wear or splashes on the very bottom edge of your cards, but I think it makes them even better than the KMCs as an inner sleeve as they will go into the outer sleeve further, with a tighter seal. The robustness, as already mentioned, seems to be excellent - I wouldn't trust them to aggressive mash-shuffling, but otherwise they seem to be very tough for a sleeve that is fundamentally rather thin. If you've had the patience to read this far, you can probably see where my conclusion is going - these are the best inner sleeves that I know of, superior even to the fabled KMC Perfect Fits - but I don't think I would trust them as a single sleeve unless playing under careful conditions - playmats, lack of nearby spillables, etc. But as I already mentioned, I'm fairly obsessive and if you aren't, these may well be the perfect light sleeve for your general needs. As a final factor in comparing to the KMCs - the Ultimate Guards are significantly cheaper, usually at least 25% cheaper. If you are sleeving thousands of cards, the difference could really add up. Conclusion: Ultimate Guard have done a great job with these sleeves, and deserve praise for the correct balance of width, thickness and length (more or less) and a wonderful solidity to the sleeves at a good price, and these are now my favourite inner sleeves. If I were to wish for any changes, it would be to improve the finish around the edges and to make the sleeves approximately 1/2 a millimetre longer - but you can see how picky I'm having to be to find fault here and this product is both Precise and (near-) Perfect. I'm interested to see what their upcoming sealable foldover version of the Precise Fit is like - I'm not sold on the idea yet but it could be a real winner if they can pull off a good design. KMCs remain as one of my favourite sleeves, but Ultimate Guard have displaced them as my go-to of choice.
