Total Cards Interview - Dragon Shield
We are super happy to sit down with our awesome friends over at Dragon Shield to discuss our new collaboration, an awesome exclusive Cube Shell design! Check out their answers below!
Who are Dragon Shield?
We’re a company that develops quality accessories for trading card games, roleplaying games and board games. You may have also noticed that we are a bunch of geeks who love to bring dragons and magical lore into everything we do!
What lies in the future for Dragon Shield?
In the very near future, we’ll reboot our entire line of portfolios in Dragonskin with the same rich colours as the new Deck Shells. They look and feel much better than before, and they still have the soft-folded page edges, as well as the hidden acrylic board inside to make them stronger than expected.
The Dragon Shield app gets new features all the time, and the Sleeve Crafter is set to evolve as well with a version for Japanese size sleeves coming soon!
There will be lots of new Dual Matte Sleeves for both standard size and Japanese size cards, and our staple holiday sleeve line continues. We will also launch an original design series that merges dragons into stellar constellations and a lot of cool IP’s like more Flesh & Blood and Superman Core. We hope you have enough decks for all of these amazing sleeves!
But wait, there’s even more sleeve goodness coming up! Outer-sleeves are on their way for standard-size cards.
The normal use for outer-sleeves is to protect fragile art sleeves or simply to protect super expensive decks even better by triple-sleeving. We’re launching two versions to expand the usefulness of outer sleeves: Clear and Black. Both are Matte to retain a good shuffle feel.
Even if you’re not into triple-sleeving, you may find that using a standard sleeve + an outer sleeve is more convenient than using a thin inner-sleeve + a standard sleeve.
To round this off, roleplayers will get new stuff as well. But more to follow on that at a later point in time.
What are the main features of a cube shell?
Cube Shells are slim, resealable boxes built to hold 15+ double-sleeved cards or 20+ single-sleeved cards. The lid locks without touching any cards, and no amount of shaking the box can open it – imagine a very big stiff version of a Perfect Fit Sealable sleeve - those don’t open on their own initiative either.
How durable are the cube shells?
They are made of 600-micron polypropylene – the same material as our Deck Shells and Double Shells, so they are pretty strong, albeit not indestructible.
What is a useful application of the cube shell that people may not have thought of?
The most common way to use Cube Shells is to buy 3 packs (24 pieces) of them, make your own booster packs and play a cube – hence the name. But they are useful for other purposes as well, like holding a sideboard or your token cards. They can hold at least 25 cards in Perfect Fit Sealables alone, which should be plenty of tokens for most decks.
Some of our dragons have a set of 5 Cube Shells comprising a small land station to bring to drafts and prereleases, and a 6th one to hold up to 40 12mm dice.
What was the design process behind the new design?
East of use and aesthetics. Our Forgemaster worked hard to get rid of that little edge that was inside the first version. While not a hazard to the cards at all, the edge was annoying, and when we figured out how to get rid of it, we changed the design for all future productions. At the same time, we decided to change the design for all the other Deck Shells to a more subtle (and cool!) UV gloss print and use richer material colours.
The base idea of making a Cube Shell in the first place was simply to meet an obvious demand. Making and playing Cubes is super fun, whether you play a powered cube or activate all those old lower-tier cards you never get to use otherwise. While working on their design, we discovered many other uses for them, and in the end, we had a product that could be used in so many different ways.
How can the cube shells be combined with other Dragon Shield products?
They fit into all our Dragonskin boxes. A Magic Carpet holds exactly 24 Cube Shells, and a Magic Carpet XL holds twice that, or alternatively 24 Cube Shells + 5 Deck Shells for the land station. You can also fit Cube Shells into Deck Shells, Double Shells, and our Nest box series to use for sideboard, tokens, dice, etc.
If you want to check out all of the awesome products available from Dragon Shield then just click the link below!
