Gamegenic Prime Sleeves Review - How do they compare with the best?

Gamegenic have cooked up a storm since their arrival on the TCG scene, earning plaudits from The Professor himself, as well as many others. With the Prime and Matte Prime sleeves being Gamegenic’s flagship sleeve offering, it’s time to put them through our demanding tests to see how they measure up against the best around. Is it all hype, or are they onto something special?

The Prime and Matte Prime sleeves are the staple of Gamegenic’s sleeving inventory, competing with Ultra Pro’s Eclipse sleeves, Dragon Shield’s Matte sleeves, as well as Ultimate Guard’s Cortex sleeves. Both Prime sleeves are available in standard card game size for Pokemon cards and MTG cards, but only the regular Prime sleeves can be found in the less sought after Japanese card game size.

The Gamegenic sleeves are 90 microns thick on the clear front, and 120 microns thick on the backs - the same as many other outer sleeves.

The shuffle-feel of both Gamegenic sleeves is very smooth with very little friction. The cards slide in-between one another effortlessly, with no sharp corners or any other unpleasantries to speak of. While shuffle-feel can be subjective, we rate this as one of the best we have experienced and award it a near perfect 9/10.

To test the strength of the seams, we start off with a simple stretch test as you have probably seen on many YouTube reviews. In this test, the Matte Primes split as easily as any sleeve we can remember, whereas the glossy Prime sleeves fared a little better. Additionally, we found that it was the right seam of the Matte sleeves that gave way every time, and the opposite left seam for the gloss Primes. Interestingly enough, this is a common occurrence for sleeves to have one seam weaker than the other! While the stretch test is not perfect, it does help pinpoint the weaknesses in sleeves such as what we see here.

This leads us onto our next test, which is to deliberately catch the corners of the seams when inserting an inner sleeved card. During this test, we were able to confirm the weakness of the Matte Prime's right seam as well the gloss Prime's left seam. In general, right handed players will catch the left seam more whilst sleeving, and vice versa for left handed players.

Both sleeves have a weak side where the seam is more likely to split.

Overall, we would score the Matte Primes a weak 4/10 and the regular glossy Primes an average 5/10 in this category. Both seams are about on par with the Ultra Pro Eclipse sleeves, slightly less resilient than the Dragon Shield Mattes, and far behind the incredibly tough Ultimate Guard Cortex Matte and Katana seams.

Our first durability test involves double-sleeving 50 cards in each the Matte and gloss Prime sleeves and then giving each stack of cards 1000 hard shuffles. The results of the shuffling can be seen below.

Both Prime sleeves took a beating in our 1000 rough shuffles. (Green = Matte, Red = Regular)

While the Matte sleeves fared slightly better than the regular sleeves, we wouldn't feel confident in saying one is tougher than the other here. Conversely, both versions of the Gamegenic Prime sleeves are remarkably similar in build, with the same texture of the backs, same thickness, and same shuffle feel - something that isn't always the case (see Ultimate Guard Cortex Matte vs Gloss).

As well as the 1000 shuffle test, we have a much quicker scratch test to see how resistant the sleeve backs are to marking.

The resilient backs of the sleeves are harder to scratch than most.

Both sleeves did well in this test (again, the sleeves backs have the exact same texture and material), and it was difficult to pick up on the subtle marks left behind unless caught in the right light at the right angle. More difficult to mark than all but the Dragon Shield Mattes and Ultimate Guard Katanas. All being said, we would give both Prime variants a strong 7/10 for durability.

If our name wasn't a giveaway, you'll be shocked to know that we take double-sleeving seriously! In order to test how easy the Prime sleeves are to double-sleeve with, we matched them with 7 different inner sleeves, resulting in 700 double-sleeving attempts for each variant.

The goal of this extensive test is to see how many times a card slips out of the inner sleeve when being inserted into the outer sleeve - we've all been there! In most cases this can be fixed, but it does make the double-sleeving process longer and more arduous than it needs to be. The results of all our double-sleeving tests are shown in the table below:

At 1/700 and 4/700 bad fits, both the Matte and Regular Prime sleeves lead the way in ease of double-sleeving. A perfect 10/10!

To see more in depth stats on all sleeves, check out our Double-Sleeving Tool.

For clarity, it's a quick test where we insert a foil card halfway into the sleeve to see if there is any dulling. We're glad to report the regular Primes are perfectly clear and the Matte Primes dull the shine significantly as intended.

The Matte Primes (green) noticeably dull the foil whereas the Regular Primes (red) have fantastic clarity.

When held to a bright light or natural sunlight, the outlines of cards can be seen through the backs of the Gamegenic Prime sleeves. However, no card details or imagery can be seen, just the silhouette of a card. This is true even with the lightest colour in the range - white. It's safe to say that the Prime sleeves are indeed fully opaque as per Gamegenic's description.

The RRP of the Primes sleeves are £7.49 / $7.49 for a pack of 100 (102 if you count the 2 spares) but can normally be found for cheaper, making them one of the best value outer sleeves.

We currently sell them in the UK for £5.95.