Article:
Its Written All Over Their Sleeves

I can almost guarantee that everyone here has either used or seen card sleeves used on someone’s deck to protect their cards, correct? Aside from the protection, these colored sleeves give the player a sense of creativity in their deck. However awhile ago, I was at my local Friday Night Magic tournament and started to realize something as I moved form round to round. The color of a player’s sleeves started to reveal a lot about the way a person played. At first I thought it was just a simple coincidence and that I was just overanalyzing things again, but then I did a bit of research to see what the mentality of colors meant.

As we all know, color is put simply as light being reflected into our eyes and that each shade is only a specific wavelength. But what we don’t know is that when these colors project to our eyes our mind then processes them and that evokes certain feelings depending on what color that you just saw. For example, warm colors (red, orange, yellow) invoke feelings such as warmth, anger, or hostility where as cool colors project emotions such as calmness, indifference, or even sadness. In some practices, colors have been used as a form of therapy, the idea being that different shades invoke certain stimulations in the body as the mind sees them.

But what does all of this have to do with playing a simple card game? Well, when a player uses mono-colored sleeves (and even some pictured ones that have a dominant color pattern) they see that color and it evokes their mind to play in a different way than they would when seeing just the blank backs of the cards. Looking at these characteristics below, you can make a good choice of card sleeve color depending on what you’re trying to run and maybe even tell what your opponent is thinking before they are.

BLACK -

When you see the color black, it is normally representing death, wrath, or evil. When you play a deck with black sleeves, odds are your deck isn’t going to pull off some big control combo, but rather just destroy everything in its path. When a player uses sleeves of this color it gives them a feeling of power, and that power allows them to pull out their strongest cards with no remorse.