need advice : card sleeves, opacity

[Marnok]

I recently opened Stone Giants pack and shuffled in to Runelords, then realised the card backs are so differently printed that it is impossible not to notice the new cards in the stacks, which of course, ruins the game.

So I am faced with the added expenditure of buying card sleeves to cover sp the backs of the entire set.

My Q is, does anyone have experience of this, and will Ultra Pro Black standard be opaque enough, or will I have to go for Dragon Shield Matte (which will end up costing twice as much)?

(I could of course just order one pack of each and test, but, I'm grumpy about having to do this at all.)

[Sam P 332]

I don't have a perfect answer for your situation, but here's my experience. I sleeved my entire Runelords set in Dragon Shield Red (original, not matte) and the sleeves are entirely opaque. My buddy sleeved his Mummy's Mask set in Ultra Pro Orange and the card back design is still distinguishable.

[Hawkmoon269]

I use Ultra Pro Standard Black and they work fine. I can not see anything through them.

There are some cheaper ways to solve the problem, though they might require more work. Many people have said they only sleeve the cards that are "in play", not their entire box. That would mean you only need to sleeve the location cards and the cards your characters have. You can sleeve and unsleeve cards as you go.

Another option is to place a single sleeve (with no card) or something else to obscure the stack of cards over top of the location deck. When you explore lift the "concealer" and pull out the top card. You'd have to be "honest" when shuffling and not look at the cards.

[Marnok]

Thanks for the replies, after discussions online and with my gaming group I went for Ultra Pro Standard Black. I like Hawkmoon269's idea for a masking stack-cover topper thingy, but, some of my players are bad shufflers anyway, and adding extra actions would make them cry. I did consider only sleeving the inplay cards but our gaming time is limited, I don't want to take up an extra 10 minutes on that, we could get a game of BANG! or something in that time instead.