Do you want to buy new sleeves for your Pokemon cards, but don’t know which ones to get? It can be hard to make a right choice, as there are just so many options. Anyway, you’ve come to the right place, as today we’ll take a look at the best Pokemon card sleeves.
If you’re in a hurry, here’s a recap of the best options, based on different criteria:
| Name | Quality | |
|---|---|---|
 | Ultra Pro Charizard Sleeves | Coolest Looking |
 | Vivid Voltage Elite Trainer Box | Comes With Boosters |
 | Dragon Shield Sleeves | Most Durable |
Do you want to know more about which brand of sleeves you should purchase and why? We’ll talk about all that in a second, but first let’s take a look at what makes sleeves good or bad.
How to Pick The Best Pokemon Card Sleeves?
When picking the right Pokemon sleeves, you usually want the following:
- Sleeves should make your deck easier to shuffle.
- They should protect your cards.
- And finally, they can give your deck a cool look.
Unfortunately, if you want sleeves of the best quality, they don’t usually feature Pokemon art. Vice versa, if you want sleeves with Pokemon art, they’ll be of a lower quality.
That’s why we decided to split the best Pokemon sleeves into two categories:
- Pokemon Card Sleeves With the Best Art
- Highest Quality Pokemon Card Sleeves
This way, you can decide what you prefer more – the art or the quality. And worry not, even though the art sleeves will usually wear out faster than the artless ones, they’ll still do the job just fine.
Let’s get to it!
Best Pokemon Card Sleeves – By Art
If you want sleeves with Pokemon pictured on them, you have two major options. Getting some Ultra Pro sleeves, or getting them from an Elite Trainer Box. Let’s check the Ultra Pro sleeves first.
Ultra Pro Pokemon Art Sleeves
If you’re looking for sleeves with official Pokemon art, your best bet are the Ultra Pro sleeves. While they are of a lower quality, they do offer a wide selection of different artworks, so you’ll be able to find something for you.
Pros
- Wide selection of Pokemon art.
- Great if you don’t play that much.
Cons
- Can get damaged very easily.
- Not great for shuffling.
- Don’t work well with double sleeves.
You can find different Pokemon Ultra Pro sleeves on Amazon. Besides that, here are our favorite ones:
Charizard Ultra Pro Sleeves – For Charizard Fans
Charizard is the most iconic Pokemon card. The powerful fire dragon is also featured on this sleeve, and it looks awesome. This is a welcome addition to any Charizard collection.
Pikachu Ultra Pro Sleeves – For Pikachu Fans
While Charizard is the most iconic Pokemon card, Pikachu is probably the most popular Pokemon overall. So this sleeves depicting one very happy Pikachu are great for his fans.
On the other hand, if you liked the recent Pokemon movie, you might prefer the Detective Pikachu sleeves.
Pokeball Ultra Pro Sleeves – Classic Design
Our final shout-out goes to this simple and elegant design. These sleeves feature a pokeball, which is quite fitting if you decide to catch ’em all.
Elite Trainer Box – Another Option for Sleeves
Second major option is to get an Elite Trainer Box. These usually contain:
- 8 booster packs
- 45 Energy cards
- some dice
- a nice sturdy box for storage
Along with all that, you’ll also get 65 sleeves. Now, while they aren’t of the highest possible quality, they come with many different designs. Most of them are quite amazing.
So if you’d like to get some boosters along with your sleeves, Elite Trainer Box is a great option.
Pros
- Sleeves feature cool design.
- Various options to chose from.
- Great if you want boosters as well.
Cons
- Sleeves are not of the highest quality.
- If you only want sleeves and not the extra stuff, it’s not worth it.
You can find out more about this product in our selection of Best Elite Trainer Boxes.
Best Pokemon Card Sleeves – By Quality
Don’t care that much about artwork on your sleeves? Do you just want to protect your cards for a long time? If so, you’ll find some great suggestions in this section.
Ultimate Guard Katana Sleeves – Hold Their Own
First up, the Ultimate Guard’s Katana sleeves. Ultimate Guard is a very reputable brand when it comes to card game supplies. They offer everything from binders to deck boxes. (Did you know that they’ve made a deck box that changes color on touch?)
Their Katana sleeves are also quite good. The backside has a great feel, and they shuffle well. However, if you’ll be using double sleeves for your Pokemon cards, you might want to pick something else.
Pros
- Amazing feel.
- Nice for shuffling.
- Foils look nice.
- Plenty of colors to choose from.
Cons
- Corners can get bent after a while.
- They can get stuck together.
- Not optimal for double sleeving.
- No art option.
Ultra Pro Eclipse – Best Shuffling Experience
Ultra Pro sleeves used to be pretty bad. They could get damaged after a single use. While these sleeves are still on the market, we wouldn’t recommend them – despite their low price.
However, their new premium Eclipse Pro-Matter sleeves are a whole different story. They have become much more durable, and will serve you for a long time.
Their best selling point is certainly the ease of shuffling. Shuffling with those sleeves is more satisfying than with any other sleeves on the market. It’s just so smooth. So if you really like shuffling your deck, we can’t recommend them highly enough.
Even though they don’t have Pokemon art on them, they come in various different colors. This way you can get yellow ones for your Electric deck, red ones for your Charizard deck, and so on.
Pros
- Best shuffling feel.
- Durable.
- Great with double sleeves.
- Plenty of different colors.
Cons
- Can quickly become dirty.
- Foil cards don’t look very special.
- No art option.
Dragon Shield Matte – Best Pokemon Card Sleeves Overall
Do you just want to buy sleeves and use them forever? If so, then Dragon Shield sleeves are your best option.
Our play group has been using yellow Dragon Shield sleeves for over five years now. (We do clean them when they get dirty from use.) In all this time, just one or two sleeves got slightly damaged. That’s insane – compared to the other options.
You’d think that their price would be much higher than it actually is. (You can check it on Amazon). However, they have quite similar price tag to the other brands we’re recommending as the other two best options.
Dragon Shield Art Series
Even though Dragon Shield doesn’t have Pokemon art on them, they still have some other art options. There’s no need to play sleeves of single color when using Dragon Shield sleeves.
Here are some of our favorite ones that you can find on Amazon:
All in all, Dragon Shield sleeves are simply the best option, if you’re looking for durable sleeves that also preform on all other areas.
Pros
- Most durable sleeves on the market.
- Plenty of different colors.
- You can get art sleeves.
- Fine for shuffling.
- Cards don’t stick together often.
- Good with double sleeves.
- Great customer support.
Cons
- Just slightly bigger than other sleeves. Might be worse if you aren’t double sleeving.
If you want to find more about them, you can read Dragon Shield Sleeves Review here.
KMC Perfect Fit Sleeves – For Double Sleeving
Finally, we have to mention a special kind of sleeve. KMC Perfect Fit Sleeves or Inner Sleeves are the best ones for double sleeving.
What’s Double Sleeving?
When you have a particularly valuable card (or a foil card that’s special to you), and you plan on playing a lot with it, you want maximum protection.
If a card is in a single sleeve, it can still get damaged on the top, where the sleeve is open. That can happen especially when you play a lot of games. On shiny (also called premium or foil) cards the damage can be quite obvious.
So you put a card into a perfect sleeve in a way that it’s open on the bottom. Then you put it in a regular sleeve, which is open on the top. This way the card is protected from both sides and can even prevent some water damage. That’s if something gets spilled on it – you still won’t be able to play Pokemon cards underwater.
The perfect sleeves fit the card, well… perfectly. In order to do so, there’s very little room for production error. That’s why we recommend KMC Perfect Fits.
Our play group used many of their packs over the years. From all this quantity, just sleeves from one pack felt a bit loose. Sure you can get an outlier now and then, but overall you’re getting an excellent option here, especially compared to some other inner sleeves on the market.
Pros
- Best option for double sleeving.
- Good price per quantity.
Cons
- You’ll also need regular sleeves to pair with them.
Best Pokemon Card Sleeves – Recap
That’s all about the best Pokemon card sleeves. To quickly recap, if you want to get the sleeves of the highest quality, you should go with the ones from Dragon Shield. If you prefer official Pokemon art over quality, you should check Ultra Pro’s selection.
Finally, if you want both boosters and sleeves, you might want to pick up an Elite Trainer Box. You can find the best Pokemon Elite Trainer Boxes here.
Are you looking for more Pokemon articles? If so, you might like the following ones:
- Best Pokemon Booster Boxes
- How to Build Better Pokemon Decks – 6 Tips
- Best Pokemon Tins
- Best Pokemon Theme Decks
Until next time, have fun, and may your new sleeves serve you for a long, long time.