Sponsored.  Dragon Shield, one of the most trusted brands in card gaming accessories, is excited to present an expanded line of products aimed toward Japanese card gamers!  For those that might not know, some card games that originate in Japan, like Yu-Gi-Oh! and Cardfight!! Vanguard, use cards that are smaller than the standard card size most American gamers know.  A typical Magic: The Gathering or Pokémon card, for example, is the standard 2.5 inches by 3.5 inches, the same as a playing card.  Japanese cards have a quarter inch off all the way around making for a more compact experience.

In November 2020, Konami, the parent company of Yu-Gi-Oh!, announced a rule change allowing for decks to be double sleeved.  Double sleeving is the practice of taking a regularly sleeved Yu-Gi-Oh! card and placing it inside another sleeve for additional protection.  In tournament play, the outer sleeve needs to be clear.  We have heard from many Japanese-size card gamers that their outer sleeve of choice is the Dragon Shield Standard Size Classic Clear sleeve.  For that, we want to thank you!

And that is one of the reasons why we are redoubling our efforts to offer an expanded line of Japanese-size products.  Dragon Shield has seven Classic colors with glossy backs available and a whopping twenty-three colors in Matte.  That’s a lot of decks if you want to experience them all.

But the real innovation comes with our latest release: Dragon Shield Matte Art Sleeves designed specifically for smaller cards.  Dragon Shield Art Sleeves are different from many other brands in that the image is not pasted on top of another sleeve.  In the past, art sleeves were made by pasting a thin image on a layer over the sleeve.  This led to those sleeves cracking and the image peeling off over time.  Dragon Shield Art Sleeves, on the other hand, are designed with the art in mind.  The sleeve itself has the art infused in the plastic, meaning there will never be peeling, scratching, or breaking.  Our art sleeves are one hundred percent tournament legal and feature incredible artwork by a variety of artists.  Use standard size classic clear or matte clear Dragon Shield over to protect the art even further.

At the time of writing, Dragon Shield offers two Matte Art Sleeves and several Classic Art Sleeves (although the classics are quite rare nowadays).  The two sleeves both feature artwork by Ina Wong depicting a dragon fruit-inspired dragon and a futuristic mecha-like dragonoid.

As with all of Dragon Shield’s products, the packaging features a piece of micro fiction to tell you a little more about the characters shown in the art.

In the future, we have plans to continue to expand our line of Japanese card size sleeve products.  While we can’t talk about specifics just yet, we can safely say that if you see an innovation in our standard size sleeves, we are working on a way to bring it to our Japanese size sleeves, too.

See the selection of Dragon Shield Japanese size sleeves here.