Disney Lorcana Accessories: A Simple Guide to Sleeves, Binders, Boxes, and Playmats

The first steps into a new Trading Card Game are always very exciting. You have to open your very first Booster pack, admiring the art of your new cards, thinking of how you will play your first games etc etc…. If you started playing Disney Lorcana (or considering to), there is also the amazing nostalgia of seeing Characters from your loved Disney movies plus a number of alternative versions of them that you were not expecting to ever see.

Whenever you are looking to just collect some cards you like or if you want to actually play with them, at one point you will find yourselves with an amount of cards that has to be stored and protected to remain as beautiful as the day you pulled them out from the pack wrap. Making sure your Disney Lorcana cards will not suffer damages over time is very important for both players and collectors. Fortunately, there is a large variety of TCGs accessories that can come in handy for this task although sometimes there are so many options that it can be a bit overwhelming when you are new to the hobby. Considering this, we decided to put together a small list of Disney Lorcana accessories that we hope can help any player finding the best accessory for their needs.

Fist step: Card Sleeves and why you need them?

Card sleeves or Deck protector sleeves are thin sheaths of plastic which envelope your precious cards with the aim to protect them from possible damages. The very first type of deck protector ever produced was the “Top-loader”, a sleeve made of rigid plastic and named after the opening on the top short side that is used to “load” the card into. The Top-loaders are great for protecting your rare and valuable cards or to avoid damages when shipping them but they are too rigid to be used to play a Trading Card Game. In fact, the large spread of TCGs in the 90' pushed the industry to develop a product able to protect the cards from wear while being also flexible enough to allow the frequent shuffling of the deck needed to play these card games.

Why using a sleeve to protect your cards is so important when playing a Trading Card Game? First, some of your cards can be quite rare and expensive and the constant shuffling will generate a lot of wear damages that will sensibly reduce their value over time. Most important, any wear and tears damage can make easy to identify a card among your deck providing an unfair advantage to the player. In fact, any easily-recognized or marked card is absolutely prohibited in any competitive setting so that preventing damages to your cards is absolutely a must when playing Disney Lorcana. On top of this, sleeving your cards will make shuffling them much easier.

Second step: Which is the best sleeve?

So, now that your card collection started to grow, you need to find the best card sleeves for Disney Lorcana to shield your cards. The first step to consider is actually “how many layers of sleeves” you want to use on your cards. The simpler and less expensive option is to just use one sleeve per card. As Disney Lorcana card size is the same of Pokemon and Magic The Gathering cards (standard, 63.5 x 88.9mm) there are plenty of products you can choose although our personal recommendation is to use a thick and opaque sleeve with a matte finish. Dragon Shield provides an amazing range of them to chose from. The thickness is obviously important to prevent damages and the opaque colour is important to ensure your sleeve will be suitable for a competitive tournament. The matte finish is also important for the same reasons as sleeves with a gloss finish tend to get more marks. Among the different options, we would strongly recommend any Dragon shield sleeve pack like for example the dual art range as they have a nice art on the back and a black background to make the artwork of the cards more visible.

When slotting your cards into the sleeve, it is important to remember to keep the card orientated in a way that the sleeve opening will stay on top during playing. If you slot the card the other way, the sleeve opening would be at the bottom of your cards and they may fall out from it when you play with them. In addition, some dust may still enter into the sleeve from the opening on the top of it and players should be very mindful to avoid spilling liquids close to the cards for the same reason.

To further reduce these risks, some players can decide to “double sleeve” their cards. In this case a slightly smaller (inner) sleeve is first used to provide a first layer of protection and then the sleeved card is put inside a standard-sized sleeve that act as a second layer of protection.

In this case, it is important to know that the second sleeve used for double-sleeving is the same standard sized you can use for single-sleeving your cards thus you can always chose to add this second layer at any time. Among the ones we tried in the past, Dragon shield range includes some very good inner sleeves to use together with the Standard ones. KMC Perfect size Sleeves are also a very good alternative.

The more efficient way to double sleeve a card is to have the opening of the inner sleeve at the bottom of the card and to have the opening of the outer sleeve at the top of the card. In this configuration, dust and liquid will unlikely reach the card inside the two layers as the opening as in opposite positions. On the other hand, a double-sleeved deck will be much thicker than a single sleeved deck and this will impact the shuffling and the storing of the deck.

Finally, there is a third type of deck protector sleeve called “outer sleeves”. As you may imagine these sleeves are slightly larger than the standard-sized ones so that these last ones can be slotted inside them. In some cases outer sleeves can be used to “triple-sleeve” your cards and achieve the maximum protection but we honestly think this approach can really be too much and may also make playing with your cards quite difficult. However, outer sleeve are in fact extremely useful to protect your Standard-sized sleeves in particular if they have any artwork like the ones released for every set by Ravensburger. In fact, Disney Lorcana original sleeves are stunningly beautiful but they can get damaged during playing the same way of a non-sleeved card thus using an outer sleeves to protect them can be a great approach. Among the options, our personal recommendation is to pick either a Dragon Shield coloured one or the clear ones for Disney Lorcana original sleeves.

Third step: How to best store your cards

Together with protecting your cards while playing, both players and collectors needs at one point to find suitable storage solution for all your Disney Lorcana cards as you can not just leave them on your desk forever. To help with this, Ravensburger has designed Disney Lorcana Illumineer's Trove boxes to safely store all your cards. Each Trove comes in fact with 8 Booster Packs to boost your collection plus some damage dice, a Lore counter, and 6 Cardboard Spacers making it a very good investment for the price. Considering there is enough space to hold at least 400 sleeved cards in two separate trays, Disney Lorcana Troves are the perfect option to store your collection or at least your bulk spares.

Some players and collectors, however, prefer to organize their cards to be more visible in order to find them easily when making new decks. In this case, the best option would be to use a Binder. When looking for a binder, the main factors to consider are how many pages and how many cards per page the binder has as you can use these information to calculate the total amount of cards that the binder can store. Of course, all pockets also have to be suitable for standard size cards.

Considering each Disney Lorcana Chapter features 204 cards (excluding any Enchanted and promo cards) and that players would likely need 4 copies of each card in case they need them for a deck, a good binder should be able to hold at least 816 cards. In reality, all binders are designed to store two sleeved cards in the same pocket therefore any binder with at least a total of 408 pockets would easily stores each of your Disney Lorcana chapters assuming you want to keep them separated. A very good approach can be to use an empty binder to have the flexibility to add as many pages as needed. The Ultra-Pro collector album using the 9 pocket top-loader pages or the Dragon Shield XL Zipster using its 16-pocket side-loader pages are both very good options. Personally, we suggest to keep the cards sleeved in the binder to reduce damages when they are taken out to be played although it is best to store them only with the standard or inner sleeve.

Final Step: What other accessory do I need to play Disney Lorcana?

While the products or strategies discussed in the previous paragraphs are suitable to both players and collectors, there are a two other products that are only aimed for players: Lore counters, damage dices, deck Boxes, and playing mats. The first two can easily be sourced in Disney Lorcana Illumineer's trove thus we will not discuss them but focus on the last two.

Playing mats are usually made of neoprene and they are another of those products that you want to use to prevent damages to your cards. In this case, a playing mat primary purpose is to avoid dust, stains or any food crumbs that may be on the table you are using to play to get on your cards and damage them. This can be very important in particular when playing in Board game cafe' or in other places where food and drinks are also served. Playing mats also help in making smoother playing with your cards as they are easier to be taken up. Finally, all Disney Lorcana Playing mats also have a very nice artwork on them that can add a lot to all your games and make the art on the cards stand out much more. Considering the good combination of aesthetics and functionality, mats are an important element to have if you are looking to play with your cards. We also strongly suggest to consider getting a tube to store and hold the mat although the package in which the tube comes can be a good alternative at least initially.

Finally, once you prepare a deck to play you will need a way to store it and bring it around. Deck boxes are a dedicated type of product that can be very simple or extremely complex. The main factor to consider in your choice is the size of your deck. Word of advice, most of these products detail a storage capacity for single sleeved cards but if your deck is double or triple sleeved you will need to consider the extra space when buying a Deck box. In general 60-70 double sleeved cards will take the same space of 80-90 single sleeved cards but, if unsure, you can compare the size of your double sleeved deck to an amount of single sleeved cards to find the size you need. Dragon Shield nest line provide a very good range of options and they all have very high quality and good prices. We particularly love the ones with the trays as they are extremely useful to hold your lore trackers and the damage dice.