Mailing This One In

You've gotta love a pun title, don't you? It's an excuse to write a joke that doesn't even have to be funny.


Fuji threw one final question to us bloggers to really challenge us to write an interesting post, by giving us a seemingly mundane topic: Which method do you find best for shipping cards?

I don't think I'll be breaking any ground here, but so far I haven't had any complaints of packages arriving in bad shape. Like most bloggers have written, it all depends on the number of cards being mailed.

Up to 4 cards, depending on thickness

For a small trade, I'll get a toploader thick enough to hold all of the cards with a little slack, and pinch the top together in the middle in such a way it doesn't damage the cards. Then a piece of plain scotch tape can hold it together without any danger of getting the cards sticky. With cards protected this way, I've had no trouble with a plain white envelope.

4 cards in an extra-thick relic toploader

Up to a 1/2 inch tall stack

These cards go into a team bag, and a toploader is placed under and over the stack. Then a liberal amount of tape is used to keep the precious cargo between the hard plastic. We're not worried about leaving residue on the toploaders, as these are mostly reused from previous trade packages. Up to 2 of these stacks can go into a small bubble mailer, or 4 or more in a large one.

40 cards or so. Yes, there's a team bag in there

Anything more

If I have at least 100 cards (or enough thick ones to equal a stack of 100 regular cards), I'll usually buy a 200 count box and tape the holes to make it a bit more water resistant just in case. I learned one handy trick from Sam at The Daily Dimwit: use crumpled pack wrappers for packing material. Typically I'll only put the wrapper-facing card in a sleeve, and trust the box to protect the rest. I don't think I've mailed any boxes bigger than the 200 yet.

By the way, these photos are crystal clear, if you can't read the cards, you've obviously got vision problems. My wife did not leave our nice camera at work, forcing me to an old one I've kept around from about 2001 with a broken screen.

Thanks to Fuji for making us work so hard on this contest. The schedule was a little grueling at the end, but it forced me to write some quality posts to intersperse with some of my dryer documentary-style posts.