So, you’ve decided you want to build a Yugioh collection. Maybe one day a friend told you about Yugioh and took you to a hobby store where you saw all these players with binders full of cards talking about the cool shiny cardboard crack they’ve collected. Maybe you recently saw a Yugioh episode from the anime on TV or online which gave you the realization and drive to get into the Yugioh TCG. Maybe you stumbled upon a Yugioh video online on Youtube while in lockdown and thought it would be cool to get into the hobby to pass time. Whatever the case may be, everyone has their reasons for collecting whether its to have something rare, shiny, and tangible to look at, an investment to make some money on the side, playing competitively, or just because it brings you a sense of fulfillment and joy. This article aims to help all kinds of Yugioh players whether its newcomers into the game looking to start building their collections or people already involved in the game grow their collections more efficiently with some tips and tricks learned from growing a collection myself.
Ok so this irresistible cardboard crack is calling out to you, and you are dead set on the idea of building a collection for whatever reason is important to you. However, you start to feel overwhelmed. You might be wondering, “where do I start?”.
First things first, you will need a place to store all of your cards to prevent them from being damaged. If you played Yugioh as a kid and are getting back into the game, you probably know this all too well from leaving them outside, stuffing them in boxes without sleeves, or piling them up in stacks and using rubber bands to keep them in stacks. If you didn’t do any of the above as a kid, you’re probably lying to yourself or were organized to the point of obsession (I’d take being organized like that any day if I knew how popular the hobby would become, also if you’re doing any of the above right now, please don’t!).
You can start with getting a couple of 9 pocket binders. The reason I say a couple is because you want to be able to stay as organized as early as possible so if/when your collection starts growing to insurmountable proportions, you’re able to find cards much easier. For binders if you’re looking for budget options, you could just get a three-ring binder and separate 9 pocket sleeves which are pretty cheap but personally I am not the biggest fan of those unless it is for bulk holo or common cards. I would recommend Ultra Pro 9 count binders but if you have a bit more money to spend, ultimate guard binders are great. They also have the quad row binders which are extremely useful because they hold 16 cards per page. The only downside is they are a little more expensive but if collections start to become big, it will definitely be a huge help to have them, otherwise you’ll need to spend more money to buy more binders.
Another useful option to store bulk cards are banker boxes. They are basically sturdy shoe boxes with dividers and are great for storing bulk cards. I would suggest you get them from card stores vs. places like amazon because they tend to be super overpriced on there. They are around $5-10 (Canadian prices by the way) depending on where you look but I’ve seen them go for $20+ on amazon.
Well great, you have storage boxes and binders. Now you can just put your cards in them, right? …No definitely not. You need the most important thing, sleeves! If you’re just planning on placing them in binders/banker boxes, you could get ultra pro or dragon shield deck sleeves, but that would get expensive really quick unless you want to be super fancy with it. The ideal scenario is getting a lot of packs of penny sleeves (which are sadly more expensive than pennies now, inflation sucks). They are still much cheaper than getting packs of 60 deck sleeves as they are around 100 sleeves for $2.95 on average. However, you can find them even cheaper. I managed to find them for $0.88 for 100 sleeves at Duel kingdom (amazing store by the way which I highly recommend). While these sleeves don’t look the greatest, they are essential for just storing cards (don’t use these on cards you’re planning to play in your deck). If you have many common cards, you can group them into sets of 15-20 cards each and they easily fit in penny sleeves while preventing them from moving. I would also recommend you put the higher rarity cards you want in penny sleeves before placing them in your binder because a binder’s layer of protection is not enough, and they can easily move around and get bent/scratched otherwise. A penny sleeve is more than sufficient but if you’d prefer to use more expensive sleeves then by all means do so! This is just a cheaper suggestion that works just as well.
Ok so you now have sleeves, banker boxes, and binders. This means you’re ready to go to a hobby store and go wild right…? Well almost. You still need a couple more essential things, one of them being toploaders. These plastic holders are amazing for keeping your highest rarity cards in and offer maximum protection. You should also use these when selling/shipping out a card to someone. Of course, you want to put cards in sleeves before sliding them into toploaders. However, our best friend inflation has caused prices of toploaders to rise in price quite a bit since the pandemic.
The other thing which is essential but not absolutely necessary is team bags. These are plastic resealable bags which prevent cards from falling out of a toploader. The toploader can easily slide into the team bag and all you need to do is seal the plastic coating on top and you’re good to go. You can get these for around $2.95 per 100 bags although they have been slightly creeping up in price as well. The reason why these are essential but not absolutely necessary is because you can also use tape which is the cheaper alternative. However, the tape can leave marks on the toploader when peeling it off which can cause the toploader to look dirty and unappealing, especially if you’re planning to reuse a toploader someone sent you.
Here’s where you’ll be rewarded for reading up to this point. Many people think that toploaders are the only and most effective means to keep cards or ship them out when selling. While this may have been the case a couple of years ago, this is not the case now.
When these toploaders started rising in price I began to search for alternative methods of shipping that would be cheaper but just as effective for protecting cards. I came up pretty empty for quite a while until one day, I found a company called “Shipping Shield”. I decided to check them out and I stumbled upon the jackpot. Shipping shield is a fairly new company dedicated to providing an amazing alternative to toploaders and at the same time addressing the issues toploaders have and improving on them with the product they’ve created. These shields are made of cardboard. Ok you might be thinking to yourself “toploaders are the gold standard and are probably much sturdier than some random product made of cardboard”. I was thinking the same thing, so I decided to reach out to them.
Shipping Shield is located in the US and because they were relatively new, they were only doing orders to the US at the time. However, they were extremely nice to deal with and told me if I were to place a bulk order of around 1800 shields, they would be able to send it to Canada, the only thing was I had to pay the import fees. You’re probably also thinking “why would I want to pay import fees which are pricy when I can just buy toploaders locally”. Well, here comes the amazing part. These shipping shields were so cheap that even after import fees and shipping costs, I SAVED almost double the amount I would have if I was buying that many toploaders. Each shipping shield is approximately $0.077 while toploaders at their cheapest used to be around $0.12. However, with the rise in prices of toploaders, each is almost about $0.25 if not more. A pack of 1800 shipping shields costed me around $139 USD with some import fees and the currency conversion to CAD resulted in a total of about $200. Even with this conversion, the shipping shields were STILL cheaper than toploaders by almost 2x the amount ($0.11 vs. $0.25).
“Ok so they’re cheap, great! They’re probably not as good or sturdy as toploaders though”. WRONG! These things are so sturdy I was shocked. They are around the same size as toploaders (3x4) but they have a flap at the top which you can open and slide the cards in super easily with a penny sleeve. You can then use tape to close the flap preventing the cards from getting out and the best part is the tape is so easy to take out from these things and doesn’t leave those ugly tape marks which you see on toploaders. In addition, they are extremely light, can fit in team bags, and can fit about 10-15 cards inside them while providing amazing protection. Furthermore, they are 100% recyclable thus super environmentally friendly. Being light has a HUGE advantage because you can fit more cards inside the shipping shield while reducing the weight of the package and potentially avoid the excess shipping fees added on due to a package being overweight. This can save you quite a bit of money.
I cannot say enough about these shields, they are amazing, and I am super happy with them. If you want, they even do customizations on the shields now so I would definitely recommend the company and encourage you to check their product out. I am not sponsored by them or anything, I just really like their product and they gave me the go ahead to talk about it because I really do think it’s something special and has helped me immensely.
I hope reading this article has been helpful and has provided a bit of insight into what you need to start a collection as well as some tricks to help you save money in the long run.
I will be doing many more of these articles to help out fellow card collectors/players in the coming months so make sure to keep your eyes peeled for the next one.
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