As part of Project Organize I began the other day a painstaking process in which I had to remove tobacco size cards from existing sleeves and then move them around for a slew of other similar size cards I’d accumulated over the last four years.

In 2014 I learned there were binder pages for these cards and at the time I had most of them stowed away. The pages I bought then from my LCS were 15-pocket sheets made by Ultra Pro

Fast forward to Black Friday 2018 and Blowout Cards had a box of 100 tobacco sheets made by BCW on sale so I decided to throw on one of those in my cart of purchases at the time.

It really wasn’t until yesterday that I realized I had a problem — I had stacks of binder pages of different sizes, and both had their pros and cons.

As mentioned earlier, the first pages I bought were from my LCS and were made by Ultra Pro. These high-quality pages accommodate for 15 cards, or three rows of five across. The pro is the pages are gorgeous when full. The con here is that the pockets are really, really deep. So if you need to shuffle stuff around you really need to work to get the tobacco size card out of the sheet.

When I opened my BCW box I noticed immediately the quality of the sheet was more rigid, but not so much that it resembled some inferior sheets from the early 1990s — so it’s still good for the cards. The pros with these sheets is you do get 20 cards per page, so you’ll need less. AND the cards are much easier to remove and then move around. The major con here is that the pockets are actually not tall enough to cover the entire card. If you look closely, the top border is exposed, which isn’t a problem for rows 2,3 and 4. But that top row is exposed to whatever may come in contact with the page.

On a side note, if you end up with BOTH brands in a binder it makes for a really odd look.

Part of me wants to stick to one brand, but fact is I own probably 100 sheets of each brand, and I’m not in a position to ditch one brand in favor of another. I’ll just have to ride this out. But I am curious what you other collectors think about these two products, which of the two you prefer and why? Neither is perfect, but they both do a good enough job to house most of these tobacco size cards.

There is an alternative, but it’s an expensive one: Buy a boat-load of the Tobacco size top loader “penny sleeve” sleeves and then use typical 9-pocket pages. But I believe those Tobacco-size “penny sleeves” are not a penny … I think you get a pack of 25 for like $3.

This entry was posted on January 11, 2019 at 9:06 am and is filed under Project Organize with tags baseball, baseball cards, BCW, Organization, small cards, sports cards, tobacco cards, Ultra Pro. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.