I will be going flying to visit my parents in a month and was planning on picking up my old pokemon collection (base set → neo genesis ~90% first editions). A recent tiktok has me freaked out about TSA: vm.tiktok.com/ZMR7c7dDc/
Does anybody have experience taking your ungraded collection through TSA? Does TSA always rifle through your cards like that? I was going to sleeve + toploader/ cardsaver most of my expensive cards and bring them in custom boxes and ETB boxes but now I’m reconsidering. I plan on getting a bunch of them graded.
Would it be better to just ship them to myself via registered mail with $50k in insurance?
In my experience traveling with cards for tournaments (decks, binders, etc.) they will almost always be flagged by TSA and they will look through them. For me, they just checked all of the deck boxes and flipped through the binder. My former league organizer (who has traveled to a lot more tournaments than I have) said once that he takes them out of his bag and puts them in a bin in security and he has had fewer issues that way.
Apparently, it has to do with how they are usually stored in bricks of cards as they move through security. Who knows exactly what they “look like” on the x-ray though.
I also recommend putting in a binder if it’s not too inconvenient, and removing from your backpack. I have been told a “stack” of cards looks similar to a homemade bomb on the scanner, especially if there are rubber bands around each stack. I was stopped for this reason carrying large amount of bulk to sell at Nationals one year. It also can’t hurt to use a binder with Pikachu on the cover or something.
Any stack of cardboard / paper will appear as a dense unidentifiable mass to airport scanners. I sell art prints at conventions around the US, and TSA always likes to open my bag to see my merch bc I’m carrying around 50 lbs of 100 gsm cardstock. Pokemon and MTG cards are similar, but as long as you can take them out and show the agents you’ll be fine.
I’d never travel with them in checked in luggage, always carry-on. Checking them in is a recipe to get your sealed booster box opened up
Slight extension to the question, I have around 73 360 card Ultra Pro binders that I’m wanting to fly with (UK to US) - shared between 2 people’s carry on. Is this even do-able?
Either way, 73 binders is ridiculous! Doubtful you’d be able to fit that many in carry on luggage, even if you had 3 carry on’s. I could only fit like 6-7 comfortably in one carry, if ya wanna turn em at different angles you’d probably be able to fit like 10-13 or so in one carry on I’d imagine.
Also, to echo other people in answering OP’s question, I’ve had similar issues at TSA as a few others in regards to decks. That being said, I had decks and binders in my bag, but they only seemed worried about the decks due to the looking like bombs reason as qwachansey mentioned.
Ah yea you might be right, even with ”only” 73 binder and 20+k cards I can’t see how you could get that on the plane. Im acutally in the middle of a move now and my packback could only fit 5 binders
That’s right 73 binders sorry, poorly worded sentence on my part (73 is how many it takes to hold every master set, btw). Hmm probably too much to fly over with, back to the drawing board (I’ll raise a separate thread as not to hijack this one into another direction).
Thank you all for your advice! Got it, don’t do toploaders in ETBs. What binders do you all use? I have a couple vaultx ones in my cart. @knotchi, you mentioned toploader pages, do you have any you’d recommend? I saw Collectors Universe had a toploader binder but the shipping to me is a whopping $91 (Hawaii) and will probably not make it to me in time.
To everyone else: Is taking a binder through TSA the way to go rather than sending them to myself with registered mail and insurance? I realize I sound paranoid.
As someone mentioned above, I also put all cards in card savers then put them just like that in the bin…loose. I’ve done that maybe a dozen or so times and they never got even a second look.
On school music tours, I was always the guy with the gaming consoles. They’d always need to wipe down and screen the case because it had so many things stacked up. I’m an organization freak, and one agent told me the fact that it was so tidy was a good thing. They’re more likely to see it as something of value and be careful with it. Now, this is not a guarantee, but in a nice pro binder or top-loader binder, it’s probably more likely to be handled carefully. Also, I think I saw a suggestion to place them in a security bin lose… Would make it obvious to TSA what they are, as well as a would be thief. Just something to consider. A balance of risk/convenience. Personally, I don’t mind the extra step if it means more secure.