March 3, 2023

Quality is at the heart of Dragon Shield. After all, that is a big reason why players choose sleeves forged by dragons. For more than 20 years, we’ve forged the most durable sleeves. Sleeves that players can always be confident to use and that regularly outlast expectations, in some cases even for full decades!

Therefore, we take note when the community starts making rumblings about the quality of our sleeves. Occasionally, sleeves will split or break. Even when forged by dragons, a rare split is inevitable. However, such cases are the rare exception and they must always remain to be so. So, when several players, independently of each other, start complaining about encountering sleeve errors – something which is usually as rare as spotting a unicorn – our team of quality dragons naturally starts investigating.

Here is what the quality dragons discovered

After searching high and low in our Forge, we have identified a malfunctioning enchantment on one of the machines our dragons use to forge sleeves. This enchantment’s malfunction impacts the consistency of the sleeve forging process. This means that while most of the sleeves forged using it are of proper Dragon Shield quality, sleeves of a weaker quality became much less rare. In some cases, packs containing too few sleeves may have left the Forge.

This inconsistency is in no way acceptable to us or to you as players. We pride ourselves in consistent high quality and this is a big part of what players know and love about our sleeves. Beyond fixing the malfunctioning enchantment, we are doing two specific things to rectify this:

Rigorous quality control

Firstly, we’ve increased our quality control efforts even further. We already keep a very high level of quality control (as those who have known us for decades can attest to), but this magical malfunction shows us that we need to be even more vigilant to ensure that something like this doesn’t slip through undetected ever again. Dragons testing the strength of a sleeve is inherently a destructive test. This means, the specific sleeve being tested doesn’t survive such treatment. By this logic, we can never test every single sleeve that leaves our Forge but know that going forward more dragons will be testing even more sleeves to ensure that you can remain confident choosing Dragon Shield in the future.

Are you one of the unlucky few?

Secondly, some of the impacted sleeves are potentially already out there on the shelves in your local game store (LGS). What to do about those? Rest assured that the vast majority of Dragon Shield sleeves are still the high quality you know and love. Only a small number of boxes are impacted by this issue. Our usual standard for issues is known to be small. Small enough that most players go for many years never encountering one single issue. Therefore, an increase by a couple of fractions of a percent may feel like a different beast entirely to us.

As the vast majority of sleeve boxes live up to our high standards, we won’t recall them. Instead, we promise that if you are unlucky enough to get a box impacted by this, we will help you out. Just roar into the aether and our dragons will hear you and take care of you (alternatively, you can use this form to contact us: https://www.dragonshield.com/contact-us). We will take care of every single one of you who reaches out to us about this.

We regret the frustration this may cause and thus we act swiftly. You should always feel confident choosing Dragon Shield sleeves. We hope with the steps we take that you will continue to feel confident in our sleeves in the years and decades to come.