Ultra Pro PRO-Fit Inner Card Sleeves Review

Ultra Pro are well known for their outer sleeves but it's worth shining a spotlight on their lesser known products such as the PRO-Fit inner sleeves. With mixed opinions found online, are these inner sleeves too tight, or are they just right? We'll get to the bottom of things in this review and see how they measure up against the competition.

The PRO-Fit inner sleeves are Ultra Pro's contender in the inner sleeve market. Designed as a base layer before inserting into an outer sleeve, these Pro-Fit sleeves are top-loading and come in standard size for Pokemon cards and Magic cards, as well as a small size for games like Yugioh.

They are 50 microns thick on each side putting them in the middle of the pack when it comes to inner sleeve thickness. The fit around the card is a tight one but, in our experience, on the right side of it. The tightness stems from fitting snugly around the card without causing the card to bend. However, we must acknowledge that this is not a view shared by all, with reports of over tightness from other sources. 

To test the strength of the seams we do a simple stretch test where we literally pull the sleeve apart to see how much resistance is given. 

In the case of the Ultra Pro PRO-Fit inner sleeves, the seams resist a little but end up splitting without too much effort being exerted. We can see this due to the plastic bending and stretching before the seam splits - an improvement over sleeves that split with no stretching, but behind the toughest inner sleeves that refuse to split at all. We rate this an acceptable but underwhelming 5/10 for seam strength.

In our comprehensive double-sleeving test, we combine the Ultra Pro PRO-Fit inner sleeves with 13 different outer sleeves leading to 1300 double-sleeving attempts. We classify each sleeving attempt as good or bad, with good meaning no issues at all, and bad meaning the card slips out of the inner sleeve when being pushed into the outer sleeve. This normally occurs if the inner sleeve is too loose, the outer sleeve is too tight, or a combination of both.

The PRO-Fit inners are one of the tightest inner sleeves we have tested and, as such, suffer from no issues when double-sleeving, even when being inserted into the tightest outer sleeves. The tight fit can be alarming, but under close inspection we found the sleeve wrapped perfectly around the card and did not pressure them to bend.

The Ultra Pro inners are tight but shouldn't cause your cards to bend.

As a result, all 1300/1300 attempts were flawless. This is head and shoulders above all other inner sleeves where the bad fits ranged from 36/1300 to a whopping 174/1300. We give the Ultra Pro inners a perfect 10/10 for ease of double-sleeving, no matter which outer sleeve you decide to combine them with.

To see a detailed breakdown of all our double-sleeving tests, visit our Ultimate Double-Sleeving Guide.

There isn't too much to say regarding clarity apart from the PRO-Fits are perfectly clear as most inner sleeves are. We test this by half inserting some foil cards into the inner sleeve to see if there is any dulling at all. As expected, no dulling, and a perfect 10/10 for clarity.

The Ultra Pro inners have perfect clarity for displaying your shiniest cards.

The goal of double-sleeving and using an inner sleeve is to add that extra layer of protection for your prized cards, making this a crucial test that must be passed.

To test just how air tight and secure the Ultra Pro inner sleeves are, we double-sleeve them with a variety of outer sleeves and submerge the double-sleeved cards underwater for 10 seconds. After removing from the water, we carefully pat the sleeves dry and found that no liquid was able to make its way down to make contact with the exposed edge of the card. In fact, the water barely made it halfway down the outer sleeve, even in looser outers such as the Dragon Shield Mattes.

A strong pass for the Pro-Fit inners and we are confident that they are able to protect your cards from moisture in the air as well as wayward drinks.

The RRP for the Pro-Fit inner sleeves is £2.99 but can be tough to find depending on your whereabouts. We currently sell them for £2.99 in the UK.

As always, prices do change over time and across stores so please do your own research for current prices.