Just wanted to share this little bit.

Recently bought AGoT 2.0, and with it I decided to invest into some sleeves to prevent my silly friends, who for some reason cannot game without eating and drinking, from staining my cards with various stuff from their fingers.

And I was amazed how easy it's to shuffle sleeved cards. I can just put once half deck on top of the other (sideways ) and press it in, and it will go in like a knife into the butter! This eases up shuffling and reduces the downtime significantly! I used excess sleeves for some of my LotR LCG cards and it's a huge replay-ability bump for me personally, as preparation is now not taking so long as it used to take, and when I lose () I can start over in just a minute!

Also, with sleeves - nightmare cards is a lot harder to distinguish from normal cards. They still have slight visual difference when you look at them, but it's sort of partially negated by the sleeves, plus you can no longer distinguish them by touch, or visually while looking at the deck.

Sleeving LotR LCG encounter decks has a nice secondary ability: all quest cards, most objectives, and some of the other two types will never actually be shuffled into the encounter deck. For example, they spend most of the game out of play, or are locations worth victory points and are automatically set as the active location at quest 1A (and thus will be put into the victory display early on), etc. These cards I sleeve in clear sleeves, while the remainder of the encounter cards I sleeve in red. This allows me to speed up the setup process immensely as I no longer have to actually search the encounter decks during setup. I always keep extra clears and reds on hand though, as sometimes I make a mistake or a weird card interaction crops up.