The first Magic sleeves
Many Magic the Gathering players ask, is it worth it to buy sleeves? From The Prodigal Sorcer fanzine. I wrote a bit about deck protectors once before. Back then I was on the hunt for the Chaos Orb puzzle; an early sales promotion by Ultra Pro to encourage players to use sleeves. The attitude towards "card condoms" was a different beast a quarter of a century ago. Many tournaments didn't even allow them, and most players didn't see the need. Some fancy people used playmats , and the rare perfectionist could try out the toploader or the penny sleeve used by baseball card collectors, but that was about it. In late 2017, about a year after I wrote the post on the puzzles, I got in contact with Frank Whittaker at Ultra Pro; a senior at the company who had been around during the early days of TCGs. He noted, "Not many people know, but we invented the Deck Protector and the Deck Box. Before us people used Toploaders to play card games. We also revolutionized collect