Ye Olde Inn

I hate rubber bands. Sure, as a kid I loved them... you could wrap stuff up, shoot them at people... awesome.

But today, I hate them. They are nasty, they get dried out and snap, or worse... they melt and stick to boxes, ruining the surface (this happened to our classic childhood sets). Other than using them to hold your mail together or something really temporary before they go into the trash, I try not to use them.

So what's the alternative? I cut some slips of card stock and made little loops that I glued together with glue-stick to be kind of a "brace" for a set of cards, but it won't work for a deck that changes size.

Maybe some kind of little elastic, cloth covered cord, like used to hold long hair together? I bet that would be a nice substitute. I have a bunch of deck protector boxes that I use for cards, but being able to bundle stuff together is just nice.

Those foam forms that people have made with cut outs to hold everything are cool, and I tell myself they only last about 30 years before they decompose into mush...

Try using ribbon. Simply tie it around the deck. If you REALLY want to be flash, try getting something to gently wrap the deck up in, such as a handkerchief or napkin, and then tie with ribbon.

And it adds a touch of class! Great idea...

I guess the stuff I was thinking of are those thing elastic strings used in bracelet crafting.

I use plastic bags. You can buy some that are an inch or two larger than the cards.
If you aren't going to tip the box at all, I use these paper card shoes: https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/9562 ... eck-holder

This thread is painfully apt for me at the moment. All this talk of Warhammer fantasy on the other threads got me up into the loft to look at my old stuff. Only to find that the elastic bands on my spell cards had snapped and glued themselves to the decks

plastic bags

Pancho wrote:This thread is painfully apt for me at the moment. All this talk of Warhammer fantasy on the other threads got me up into the loft to look at my old stuff. Only to find that the elastic bands on my spell cards had snapped and glued themselves to the decks

Wait! I bet there is a way to remove them somewhat less painfully... before you rip them off. (Also what kind of elastic, so we know not to use that... please)

Kurgan wrote:

Pancho wrote:This thread is painfully apt for me at the moment. All this talk of Warhammer fantasy on the other threads got me up into the loft to look at my old stuff. Only to find that the elastic bands on my spell cards had snapped and glued themselves to the decks

Wait! I bet there is a way to remove them somewhat less painfully... before you rip them off. (Also what kind of elastic, so we know not to use that... please)

Ok so the damage wasn’t too bad in the end. Most of the decks were in plastic bags but I must have ran out, and 3 decks had the broken elastic bands. I managed to get it off easily with a craft knife as it wasn’t glued that badly.
BUT, last year I had the same problem with my Heroquest cards and my Lone Monster and Fimir spells were ruined and had to be reprinted.

On every occasion it was the coloured elastic bands that did it, you know the non-standard coloured ones. I’m thinking that it’s the colouring they put in them that might cause the yucky gluing effect.

At work we use a lot of bundles of flags, and they ship to us with rubber-bands on them. When they heat up, they stick really bad. Those are the normal tannish ones.

So it has a rubbery surface as opposed to cloth covered? Or the dye leached out of the cloth covering?

The rubber bands we had were the thick blue ones that were formerly used to wrap up the newspaper. Most of the ones that side are tan colored. When I have my mail held I get them and they are usually so dry they snap right there as I am taking them off my mail. A decade or so in storage and they turn into hardened clay that sticks to cardboard.