What Size Are Riftbound Cards? Sleeves, Boxes & Binders

Sleeves are the cheapest insurance in the hobby and the easiest thing to get slightly wrong. This guide answers the sizing question first, because that is what most people actually came for, then covers the three purchases that follow it — sleeves, a deck box and a binder — with the numbers that come from this game specifically rather than from trading cards in general.

The short answer on card size

Riftbound cards are printed at the standard trading-card size. That is the same size used by Magic: The Gathering, Pokemon, One Piece, Lorcana and essentially every modern physical TCG: nominally 63 x 88 mm for the card itself, with sleeves for that size sold as 66 x 91 mm to leave a working tolerance.

The practical consequence is the useful part. You are not shopping a Riftbound-specific accessory market. Any sleeve, deck box, binder, top-loader or playmat sold for standard-size cards works, which means you get the whole market's pricing, colour range and availability rather than a narrow game-branded subset at a game-branded price. If a product page says "standard size" or lists Magic or Pokemon compatibility, it fits.

That single fact makes almost every other accessory decision cheaper, and it is worth knowing before you pay a premium for anything with "Riftbound" printed on the packaging.

The exception nobody mentions: 56 cards are sideways

Here is the detail that general sleeve advice will not tell you, because it is specific to this game.

Of the 950 cards in our catalogue, 56 are printed in landscape. Every single one of them is a Battlefield. The other 894 — units, spells, gear, runes and champion Legends — are portrait, the orientation you expect.

Battlefields are the same dimensions as everything else, so they take the same standard sleeve; you just insert them turned ninety degrees. Nothing about sleeve shopping changes. What does change:

• Binder pages. A landscape card in a portrait 9-pocket page sits with white space above and below, and reads as a gap in an otherwise tidy page. Collectors who care about how a binder looks tend to give Battlefields their own page rather than scattering them through the set in collector-number order.
• Playmat layout. Battlefields are contested during play and sit in the middle of the table rather than in your own rows. If you are choosing a playmat, the zone that matters is the shared middle, not the width of your hand.
• Top-loaders. A rigid top-loader is portrait. A landscape Battlefield goes in sideways and does not fill it, which looks wrong and lets the card shift. For a Battlefield worth protecting, a one-touch magnetic holder is the better call — those are square enough to present either orientation properly.

It is a small thing, but it is the kind of small thing you only discover after buying the wrong binder.

How many sleeves a Riftbound deck actually needs

This is where most people under-buy, because the instinct from other games is to count the main deck and stop.

A Riftbound deck is not one deck. It is a Legend, a main deck, a rune deck, three battlefields and a side deck, and every one of those cards is handled during play:

So the honest number is 66 sleeves per deck, not 40. Our guide to how a Riftbound deck is built carries the construction rules behind that table, including the three-copy limit shared across main and side deck.

The runes catch people out most: they are a separate deck that gets shuffled and handled every single game, which makes them more exposed to wear than a main-deck card you might draw once a match, not less.

Practically, a 100-count pack of sleeves covers one deck with 34 spare — which is about right, because you will replace split sleeves over a season. If you are building two decks, buy two packs rather than trying to stretch one; mixing sleeve batches part-way through a deck creates a visible difference that a judge is entitled to take seriously.

If you want to know what a deck costs to assemble before you spend anything on sleeves for it, paste the list into the deck builder for a card-by-card build cost in your own market, or run it through Best Basket, which works out the cheapest split across stores once postage is counted.

Choosing sleeves: the four things that actually matter

Ignore the marketing and there are four real variables.

Opacity. The back of the sleeve must be completely opaque. A sleeve that lets even a faint shadow of the card through is a marked deck in any tournament, whether or not you intended it. This is the one specification where you should not economise, and it is the usual failure of very cheap bulk sleeves.

Finish. Matte shuffles better and photographs without glare; gloss looks sharper on the shelf and slides more. For a deck that gets shuffled every game, matte is the default choice for almost everyone. Gloss makes more sense for a binder or a display piece.

Thickness. Measured in microns. Thicker resists bending and holds shape in a box; thinner keeps the deck slim enough to shuffle comfortably. For a single-sleeved deck, mid-range is fine. Thickness becomes a real decision only when double-sleeving, which is the next section.

Consistency of the batch. Sleeves from the same production run should be identical. Cheap sleeves vary enough between packs that a mixed deck can be distinguishable card-to-card — the same marked-deck problem as an opacity failure, arrived at differently.

Once those are settled, colour is a free choice, and Riftbound gives it an actual job: each domain has a fixed official colour, so sleeves can signal what you are playing. Our gradient sleeves guide covers pairing a fade to a one- or two-domain deck, which is the genuinely Riftbound-specific part of the colour decision.

Double-sleeving: worth it, but not for every deck

Double-sleeving means a thin inner sleeve on the card, usually inserted upside down so the card is fully enclosed, then the outer sleeve you actually shuffle. It gives you near-complete protection from spills and edge wear.

It is worth it when the cards in the deck are individually expensive — a chase-rarity Legend or a Showcase print you would not casually replace. It is not worth it for a budget build, where the sleeving costs a meaningful fraction of the deck's value and the shuffle feel gets worse for nothing.

The trade-off is real: a double-sleeved 66-card deck is noticeably thicker and stiffer than the same deck single-sleeved, which changes both how it shuffles and what box it fits in. Which brings us to the purchase people most often get wrong.

Deck boxes: the capacity number is not the card count

A deck box quoting "holds 100 cards" is usually quoting unsleeved cards. That is close to useless as a guide, because nobody carries unsleeved cards.

The rough conversion:

• 66 cards, single-sleeved — comfortable in a box rated around 100.
• 66 cards, double-sleeved — needs roughly a 150-count box.
• A deck plus its runes and battlefields as separate stacks — many players prefer a box with an internal divider or a second compartment, so the 12 runes are not shuffled into the main deck by accident between games.

Add headroom in both cases. A box you have to force closed puts constant pressure on the sleeves at the top of the stack and will split them along the seam within a season.

Binders: size it from the set, not from a guess

For long-term storage of cards you are not playing, a binder is the right answer, and the size follows from arithmetic rather than taste.

A standard 9-pocket page holds 9 cards per side, 18 per sheet. So:

• Origins, at 298 base cards, needs 34 pages one-sided — 17 sheets if you fill both sides.
• Smaller sets scale down proportionally. Our set breakdowns carry exact base counts: Origins, Spirit Forged and Unleashed, plus every set in release order.

Then add pages. Alternate arts, Showcase treatments, promos and signature prints are not in the base numbering, and they are the cards you most want in a binder. Budget roughly 25 to 35 percent more pages than the base count implies, or you will be rebuilding the binder the first time you complete a chase row. If completing a set is the goal, how to complete a Riftbound set covers the order to do it in.

Two binder specifications matter beyond size. Side-loading pockets rather than top-loading, so cards cannot slide out when the binder is carried or stored flat. And a strap or zip closure rather than a ring binder — rings dent cards at the spine, and a full ring binder does not close flat, which is how corners get crushed.

Playmats, and what you can skip

A playmat is genuinely useful for play: it stops cards sliding on a table, gives you a clean surface to pick up from, and reduces edge wear when you slide a card off the table edge. Standard TCG playmat sizing works, since the card size is standard. Buy one you like the look of.

What you can skip, at least at first:

• Game-branded accessories at a premium. The size is standard; the premium buys you artwork, not fit.
• Top-loaders for bulk. They are for individual valuable singles, not for storing quantity. A binder or a storage box does that job better and cheaper.
• Rigid cases for anything you actually play. A card in a one-touch is a card you are not playing.

What a new player actually needs on day one

If you have just bought your first deck and want the short version, this is the whole list:

1. One 100-count pack of matte, fully opaque, standard-size sleeves. Covers the 66-card deck with spares.
2. One deck box rated around 100 sleeved cards, ideally with a divider so the runes stay separate.
3. Nothing else.

A playmat is a nice-to-have that improves play and protects card edges, and it can wait until you know you are staying. A binder is for a collection, not a deck, and you do not have a collection yet. Top-loaders are for individual cards worth more than your deck, and you will know when you own one.

The total is small, and it is the highest return-on-cost purchase in the hobby: an unsleeved deck played weekly picks up visible edge wear within a month, and a card that drops from near-mint to lightly played has lost a real slice of its value for the sake of a purchase you could have made for the price of two booster packs.

One rule-level reason to take sleeves seriously

Worth stating plainly because it catches people at their first event: sleeves are part of your deck's legality, not just its protection.

Two requirements do the work. Every sleeve in a deck must be identical — same product, ideally the same batch. And the backs must be opaque and unmarked, with no scratches, scuffs or bends that would let any card be identified from the back.

A deck with three replacement sleeves from a different pack, or a handful of sleeves that have picked up distinguishing scuffs over a season, is a marked deck as far as a judge is concerned, regardless of intent. That is why the advice above is to buy a 100-count pack for a 66-card deck rather than exactly enough: mid-season replacements come from the same pack, and the deck stays uniform.

It is also the strongest practical argument for matte over gloss for a deck you actually play. Gloss shows scuffing more readily, and scuffing is the thing that turns a legal deck into a marked one.

Protect what is worth protecting

The last point is the one that saves the most money, and it is a sorting problem rather than a shopping one.

Most of a Riftbound collection is not worth protecting individually. Commons and uncommons are worth pennies and belong in a bulk storage box. The value sits in a small number of cards — Showcase treatments, signature prints, chase rarities — and those are the ones that justify a one-touch, a top-loader, or a slot in a binder page rather than a box.

To find which of yours are which, the most valuable Riftbound cards shows where the top of the market sits, and the bulk pricer will value a list of cards at once so you can sort by what they are actually worth rather than by what feels rare. For anything you are considering grading, condition matters more than protection after the fact — a card that is already lightly played will not grade well no matter how well you store it from today.

Then store the rest properly and stop thinking about it: how to store and protect Riftbound cards covers the longer-term questions — humidity, sunlight, and what actually degrades a card sitting in a box for a year.