How to store trading cards so they keep condition

Store a card in layers: a soft polypropylene sleeve against the card, then a rigid holder or a binder page if you want to see it, or a closed box if you don’t. Keep the box somewhere cool, dry and dark, away from basements, attics and outside walls. Thick cards need thicker holders, sized by a pt number such as 35pt.

Storage matters because wear sets a raw card’s condition and its price. A crease, a curl or sun fading can each move a card down the scale in our guide to card condition.

What does each piece of storage do?

A toploader holds a single card. BCW’s standard holder opens on the short side, so the card slides in from the top.

Which toploader fits which card?

Card thickness is given as a pt number. Standard cards run from 20pt to 35pt, a range that holds most Pokémon, Magic, One Piece and Lorcana cards as well as modern base sports cards, and they fit a regular toploader. Thicker cards need thicker holders, and BCW’s range from 59pt to 360pt.

To measure a card, BCW offers a printable thickness gauge, which must be printed at 100% scale with no fit-to-page setting. Without a gauge, BCW suggests stacking dimes and quarters to the card’s height: one dime matches its 59pt holder, one quarter its 79pt holder and two quarters its 138pt holder. Our guide to autographs, patches and short prints explains the thick card types in this table.

Are binders safe for cards?

• Thickness. Ultra PRO advises against cards thicker than 55pt in its 9-pocket pages. Those pockets are not gusseted, so a thicker card gets no extra room, and Ultra PRO says that can damage corners and edges. Ultra PRO suggests its 4-pocket toploader pages for those cards.
• Tight sleeves. TCGplayer warns sellers that “perfect fit” sleeves are hard to remove and can lead to condition downgrades or damage when the card comes out.

Keep rubber bands away from cards. The Library of Congress advises against rubber bands, self-adhesive tape and glue on paper, and TCGplayer lists loose cards and rubber bands among the packing habits that can damage cards.

Which plastics are safe?

Archive guidance is blunt. The Missouri State Archives says to look for polyester, polypropylene or polyethylene, calls these the only plastics to use for archival storage, and says to avoid polyvinyl chloride, also called PVC or vinyl.

• Ultra PRO calls its card sleeves archival-safe, non-PVC polypropylene film.
• BCW’s standard toploader is rigid, high-clarity PVC.

So BCW’s standard toploader is made of the plastic that the archive guidance says to avoid. With a polypropylene sleeve inside the toploader, the card’s own surface sits against polypropylene. The Missouri handout, revised in April 2001, also advises asking a supplier for written specifications, because formulas can change without notice.

Where should the box go?

A card is printed card stock, a kind of paper, so guidance for paper applies. The two figures below serve different jobs.

The first figure is a target for paper kept long term, and the second is a line to stay below. The Canadian Conservation Institute adds that a perfectly correct humidity value may not exist for many collections, and for general archives it lists 50% as a setpoint. A small hygrometer shows a room’s humidity.

The Canadian Conservation Institute also names the problem spots in a house. Basements, and ground floors with no basement, tend toward damp. Shelves against outside walls see high humidity in cold weather. A poorly ventilated attic gets very hot in summer, which drives humidity very low. The Library of Congress says to avoid attics and basements and to keep paper away from direct or intense light.

Changes cause trouble as well as extremes. The Canadian Conservation Institute explains that paper changes size as humidity moves, and that sheets with a printed layer can split apart or distort. TCGplayer says foil cards warp on their own, even ones that went straight from the pack into a toploader, and that weather and changing temperatures can warp them in transit. Under TCGplayer’s rules, a card whose middle lifts more than 5mm off a flat surface counts as Damaged, and fading or yellowing from extreme or prolonged sun exposure counts as damage too.

Smell can matter at sale time: TCGplayer turns away material that smells of smoke or other chemicals, even when it looks fine.

How should you move or mail cards?

TCGplayer’s packing rules for sellers sending in a shipment give a sound model. Seal the cards in a team bag with a toploader or a piece of cardboard for stability, and use a small bubble mailer or box where the cards cannot move or flex. TCGplayer lists packing peanuts, bubble wrap and air cushions among its approved packing materials. It also says to tape the flaps of a flat rate box, because wet, heat, cold or rough handling can make the box’s own adhesive fail. For a graded card leaving a rip site’s vault, see what it costs to ship a graded card home.

What does a starter setup look like?

1. Put every card you care about in a soft polypropylene sleeve, with clean, dry hands.
2. Move your best cards into standard 35pt toploaders, and thick cards into the holder that matches their pt number.
3. Use 9-pocket pages for sets, and keep anything over 55pt out of them.
4. Put bulk cards and rows of toploaders in a storage box, and label the box.
5. Keep the box on a shelf in a lived-in room, off outside walls, out of the sun, and out of the basement and attic.

A graded card already sits in a sealed holder, the slab. If your cards sit in a rip site’s vault, the site stores them for you; our guide on whether to vault or ship a card home weighs that choice. Rip.fan’s Pokémon card pages list a separate price for each raw condition, which shows how much the condition step matters for a given card.

Frequently asked questions

How much thicker are deck sleeves than penny sleeves?

Two to three times. Ultra PRO's Eclipse, PRO-Matte and PRO-Gloss sleeves use 90 micron film on the clear front and 120 micron on the back, and its Premium Card Sleeves use 50 micron film on both sides.

Is a sleeve with a UV inhibitor better for storage?

Not necessarily. Ultraviolet inhibitors belong with unstable plasticizers, dyes and surface coatings among the additives to ask a supplier about before buying archival storage, since some could damage the items they hold over time.

Does every card need a sleeve before it ships to TCGplayer?

No. For TCGplayer Direct shipments, sellers are asked to sleeve or toploader only cards valued at $25 or more, because TCGplayer's team takes sleeves off to check each card and over-sleeving slows that work.

Can a curled foil bought on TCGplayer go back to the seller?

Yes. TCGplayer treats a curling foil as a condition issue, so the seller resolves it under TCGplayer's refund and return policy, and you reach them through the Contact Seller button in your order history.