Sleeves are an overlooked form of pokemon merch

I’ve got an ultra pro sleeve. Would it be considered an official Pokémon sleeve?

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Source for ray sleeves?

Its officially licensed, Ultra-Pro manufactured three sets of sleeves that matched the Japanese “Rulers of the Heavens”, “Magma VS Aqua: Two Ambitions”, and “Flight of Legends” pack artwork back in ‘04/’05.

Unfortunately, there are counterfeits of these sleeves floating around out there.

Genuine versions of these sleeves will have the little Ultra-Pro foil stamp in the bottom corner on the side that is transparent, counterfeits will not and will generally have worse print quality.

Avoid buying these from an eBay seller called “Kruk Cards Inc”, they have a bundle for all three sleeves but they’re all repros/counterfeits.

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folks, we’ve seen it all. Counterfeit ultrapro sleeves. What a time to be alive. Thanks for the info!

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Every time I see certain sleeves I can’t help but think the pattern/artwork for some of them would make amazing binders as well. Would love to put my Piplup line in a ‘Baby Blue Eyes’ binder.

I’ve always struggled to use Mecari. I can never find what I want. Should I be translating my searches before putting them in?

In case anyone was wondering, these are what the counterfeits look like (my pictures before I returned my order):

The official ones look like this (not my pictures) - notice the Ultra-Pro foil stamp:

If you don’t care about authenticity then the repros are fine to put in a binder - just beware they feel cheap and the print quality is not amazing (the Pokemon TCG logo looking bad was the first thing that gave them away as being repros back when I bought them).

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Should’ve gave the ray to a big rayquaza collector.

hmmmm….

I mean you can get 20 of them for $12 from the one eBay seller I warned about (plus you get 20 each of the other two designs too).

Legitimate packs of these sleeves go for around $40-60 right now but you only get 50 sleeves in a pack… I’m not really sure what the logic was there but it seemed to be a standard thing for Ultra-Pro sleeves back then.

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I always translate my searched beforehand, i’ve had quite good results with “pokemon card shield” ポケモンカードシールド with the pokemon name i’ve tried to find, maybe just replace the “pokemon” with the pokemon name

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You can do what @joponnes recommended. You can also try using the translated name rather than the localized name (ex: use “Hinoarashi" instead of “Cyndaquil”).

Alternatively, you can use proxy selling websites like Zenmarket to browse listings and let it do the translations and stuff for you.

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Yes, i always check the japanese spelling for pokemon names for example from bulbapedia, for example for those cyndaquil sleeves i would straight up search ヒノアラシカードシールド

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@rattrocker @joponnes That a lot of help thank you

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New and exclusive sleeves are being given out to the winners of the Southeast Asian Premier League tournaments. I believe that means only 36 will be given out.

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