Foils, curl, and the short list of what ruins cards

Holos and textured cards are the same size as the rest of the set and less forgiving of everything else. The film scratches, the texture snags, and the sheet curls when the paper and the foil disagree about humidity. Treat them as the first cards you sleeve, not the ones you leave out to look at while you eat.

Curl

A gentle curl often settles if you sleeve the card and leave it somewhere with steadier humidity, flat, with no weight on it beyond its own sleeve. Lorcana foils do this more than most — the Lorcana guide is the short version of that habit. A hard bend 'to fix it' creases the core. A crease is permanent. Extreme curl can be a storage problem — a damp room, a window, a stack left in a hot car — and the fix is the room, not a heavier book on top of the holo.

Stop doing these

• Rubber bands and elastic hair ties around a stack.
• Paperclips, binder clips, or tape on the card or its sleeve.
• Screw-down holders, especially tightened hard.
• PVC binder pages, and any page that will not say what it is made of.
• Two raw cards sharing a pocket, or an unsleeved card against a sleeve.
• Food, drink, and hand cream in the same session as raw cards.
• Sun on a desk, a sill, or an open binder.
• Shuffling unsleeved, or shuffling in sticky penny sleeves.
• Erasing whitening. You are sanding the card.
• Forcing a thick card into a perfect fit or a too-small toploader.
• Storing dice loose against cards.
• A heavy flat stack for months, or a leaning row in a half-empty box.

The whole armoury, in one line

Edges only. Sleeve before you sort. Match the sleeve to the card size. Rigid plastic only over a penny sleeve. Side-load, no PVC, no rings if you can help it. Dark, upright, and a room that stays in a boring humidity range. If it might be graded, do not clean it, and pack a semi-rigid, not a toploader.