Will play in the sealed tourney at gen con this year and since it’s my first I wondered about sleeving my deck once I build it. Do they have to be pro matte or will regular ultra pro sleeves work? I know that they cannot have transparent backs and that starting cards must be in different color sleeves.

Thanks

They can be anything you want as long as you can't see through them.

Just about everyone has a different brand they favour. If you avoid the lighter colours odds are you'll be fine.

Regular Ultra Pros are about the same opacity as Pro Mattes on a color-by-color basis. There are a few light colors that aren't great and could possibly raise some objections depending on the tournament judge. If you're in the market for sleeves, my current favorites are the Ultra Pro Eclipse sleeves. Even the white ones are perfectly opaque, and the black interior backing looks really clean, IMO.

Ultra Pro Eclipse solves this.

The need for opaque sleeves on freshly opened cards ...... so sad.

I do however like the Bushiroad sleeves as the art on them is great:

As sleeves go I would double sleeve into a Matt Dragon Shield because they are gloss and hard to shuffle. However they do have a foil layer on the backs and are impervious to anything shinning through.

On 7/1/2018 at 2:09 PM, Mep said:

The need for opaque sleeves on freshly opened cards ...... so sad.

Honestly if you’re not playing with proxy cards or FFG’s official swag cards... people are probably fine playing unsleeved. At most tourneys or Galactic Qualifiers I’ve been to there’s someone new there who’s opening packs and playing for the first time.