Whether you are starting a baseball card collection, football cards, basketball cards, or any other sports cards, you need great sports card collecting supplies to protect them and keep them in the best condition. Getting the right sports card supplies is crucial for protecting, organizing and growing your card collection.
Here’s a comprehensive guide to the essential sports card collecting supplies every beginner should have.
Sports Card Collecting Supplies: Protective Gear & Storage
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Card Sleeves / Penny Sleeves
Penny sleeves are your cards’ first line of defense against damage. These thin, pliable sleeves protect card corners from soft dings and surface damage. Really, these are probably the most important sports card collecting supplies because you use them first when you open a pack of cards.
Card Toploaders
After placing your card in a penny sleeve, slide it into a toploader for crucial additional protection. Toploaders are rigid plastic cases that offer excellent protection against bending, dinging the corners and other physical damage.
Ultra Pro Top Loaders are easily my favorite choice – and here’s why. Many of the other brands of toploaders are much more brittle, so as you put them in and out of boxes or binders and they bump into each other, they tend to chip. When bad toploaders chip, that brings danger around your precious cards! You don’t want floating chips of broken plastic near your sports cards.
My Pick: Ultra Pro Penny Sleeves & Toploaders (100 Count) Card Protecting Kit on Amazon.
If you’d rather buy in larger amounts for a lower per-piece price, you can get 1,000 Ultra-Pro penny sleeves for less than $15, and 1,000 Ultra Pro Toploaders for just over $100.
One-Touch Magnetic Holders
Penny sleeves and toploaders are great for lower valued cards, cards you might someday get graded or cards worth less than $50. But once you get beyond that, you might want to display specific singular cards, and you aren’t ready to send it in for grading yet. These cases provide superior protection and display options, they’re easy to use, and they can be temporary until you decided to someday grade your valuable cards.
My Pick: 10-pack of BCW One-Touch Magnetic Holders (35-pt cards) for under $15.
Toploader Binder
While not as popular as they once were, card binders with 9-card pages can be useful for organizing and displaying lower-value cards. While I don’t believe you should ever use binders for unsleeved/un-toploaded cards, I do LOVE these Toploader Binders.
My Pick: Rayvol Toploader Binders on Amazon. They come in black, red, blue, green, forest green and white. I get different color binders for my different sports (black for baseball, blue for basketball, green for football and red for hockey and other sports.)
Card Storage Boxes
To keep your collection organized, invest in card storage boxes. This way, you can put your card collection away and not worry about damage or loss.
My Pick: Yexiya makes four-row, 3,200-count box to accommodate top-loaded cards, one-touches, and other card sizes. You can buy multiple boxes on Amazon and get a discount.
These articles are meant to help all sports card collectors, but they should be especially helpful for new card collectors trying to learn where to start:
- The Best BASEBALL Rookie Cards From Each MLB Season Since 1941
- The Best BASKETBALL Rookie Cards From Each NBA Season Since 1948
- The Best FOOTBALL Rookie Cards From Each NFL Season Since 1956
- The Best HOCKEY Rookie Cards From Each NHL Season Since 1951
- 7 Steps To Setting a Card-Collecting Hobby Budget
- 5 Must-Have Sports Card Collecting Supplies For Beginners
By starting with these basic sports card collecting supplies, you’ll be well-equipped to begin your sports card collecting journey. As your collection grows, you may find the need for more specialized supplies, and you can read our articles to help you do just that!
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