Hokay, so:
If you know anything about Dragonshields sleeves, check this out. This week debuts the release of the newest color in the Dragonshield card sleeve range: Turquoise. We received our shipment yesterday, and we decided to crack a box to show people what they look like first-hand.
We were impressed.
What we here at Curio have become aware of over the past few years of selling Dragonshields are two primary things:
1). Dragonshields are incredibly durable and don't bend or scratch easily. We often hear stories of players who have been using the same Dragonshields for 4+ years and have yet to tear a sleeve.
2). Dragonshields, ever since their joining to Fantasy Flight Games as a distributor of the Dragonshield product, has had some hiccups in certain production aspects. Nothing that makes each sleeve itself normally (there has been exceptions) any less in quality- in fact they still ring true. It's the width and height that has been seeing minor fluctuations occasion.
What that means is that sometimes you will open a box of Dragonshields, and the width of each sleeve will vary by .5 to 1 milimeter or something like that, and sometimes worse. It is hardly a problem most of the time, and it is in fact quite similar to how most card sleeves are designed by almost every company these days, but it could be better, and in the past it has been better.
You see, Dragonshields have been around a long time. They weren't the first, however. in 1995, Ultra Pro created the first card sleeves specifically designed for collectible and trading cards. They called them "Deck Protectors". They were an excellent product for the time, but improvements were to be made, and Dragonshields were designed and born in Denmark. They certainly set the bar as they made their way around the globe. Years later, they became branded by the company Arcane Tinmen (who also now owns the rights to The Spoils CCG). Arcane Tinmen is still based in Denmark, but a handful of years ago they chose to join forces with Fantasy Flight Games to better manage and distribute their premiere Dragonshield sleeves, especially within the United States.
While that merger of sorts was bold and probably highly-lucrative, it created a huge demand on the production side for Arcane Tinmen. They suddenly needed to make many more Dragonshield sleeves to meet the quotas Fantasy Flight could acquire for them.
Production faltered. Even here at Curio, we saw it. New arrivals of Dragonshields were mostly good, but at least one box of Dragonshields in an order would be completely unacceptable. 1-2 milimeter changes in sleeve width, chaff still on the sides of the sleeves, sleeves that weren't fully cut, and even damaged sleeves. It got to the point within weeks where it was multiple returned boxes per order. We reached a level of expectancy for Dragonshields to be hit-or-miss. We came to an unfortunate decision: for a solid two months at least, we stopped carrying Dragonshields entirely. It had become very frustrating, and we were ready to never carry the product again. Here was this great, amazing product, and now it had been reduced to a rushed and haphazard version of its former self. We gave our distributors, and even Fantasy Flight directly, our honest feedback.
Fortunately, many others must have as well, because the production side of Dragonshields changed for the better sooner than we expected. It brought us to where we have been for the past year and a half- the same way described at the beginning of this Cast. Excellent durability and quality, but slight variance in width and sometimes height from sleeve to sleeve. Still some minor issues.
Now, finally, let us take a look at these new Turquoise sleeves. I think this is something very important to note, especially coming from a Dragon Shield product:
They are perfect.
The height of each sleeve and the width of each sleeve is more exactly matched than we have ever seen in any standard-size CCG sleeve. Ever. It is truly impressive.
We let our customers in-store see this box of Turquoise Dragonshields yesterday and, as you may have guessed, we sold several. And you know what? Every box was the same. Beautiful and perfect.
Thank you, Arcane Tinmen, for restoring glory to your product and then pushing it even further to the zenith of card sleeve excellence. These are truly amazingly designed.
-CC
P.S. The number of sleeves in this 100ct box? 104. :-)
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