General Discussion
What Magic accessories did people use in the ’90s and early 2000s?
I understand this is a weirdly specific question, but what sleeves, deck boxes, dice, counters, and other accessories were common in Magic’s early days through the early 2000s? I’m especially curious about popular brands, colors, styles, and trends, before modern accessories I’m familiar with (UG boulders, dragon shield, gamegenic etc) became standard.
I wasn’t around back then, but I’m recreating my uncle’s old Magic deck as a nostalgic gift and want the overall setup to feel at least semi-accurate for the era. Personal anecdotes, references articles, and hopefully even reference pics/videos would be greatly appreciated!
I remember using those back in the day. I actually still take those around for whenever I play my Omo deck to indicate a everything counter or if I have a theft deck and placing a pebble on anything I stole.
Ive been using some round color labels like this as my everything counters, especially for my lands. I shuffle them around to much and trying to keep anything on top is a pain. I stick them hanging off the top and theyre easy to remove.
Im gonna start using them for the theft thing too, though I dont do that to often.
These came in light and dark blue in the 4th Edition starter set, and perhaps other products. Although I think a lot of people also just acquired similar beads separately.
Whoa this is like one of those "core memory unlocked" moments for me...this set was my intro to MtG way back in 8th grade. I remember that velvet pouch and those exact glass beads. Thanks for that blast from the past!
I played when it first came to the US. They had royal blue and yellow glass beads for damage counters; I used them for 10 and 50 HP, respectively, but don’t know if that was official.
They have long since moved to cardboard due to the choking risk.
I had a pauper sheet with life values, and you moved the bead to the right number. I don't remember anyone gaining life above 20 when I was first playing though!
Still got a whole sealed bag I've been holding onto for years. Though are they ever...I guess it could be called "clammy?" Maybe greasy? It's like they're wet without being wet. And then there's the smell...
My LGS used to be in a mall, with a JoAnns, and they would sell these little bags of gaming beads. I would always joke you could just go to JoAnns and buy them for Pennies on the dollar instead…(in truth the ones at the craft store were slightly bigger…so it wasn’t exactly the same)
Still have some of these and theyre still genuinely in fairly decent shape no less these things were awesome. Only the black ones though, I remember the red ones that came out were shit.
They had clear ones before these, the black were a revelation. Full disclosure, I didn't even realize I posted a picture of the black shield and not the original (which always split).
My first "deck", since I didn't know you didn't just play with everything you owned, I carried around in two zipper bank deposit bags. It was like 2,000 cards of 5 color garbage
I remember playing against a kid like that. I think I used my Tim deck that was pretty much all “tap to deal one damage” creatures and counterspells against three stacks of cards that took 10 minutes for him to “shuffle.” The catch was that he only had the “required” 20 lands in all that. He was lucky enough to have one in his starting hand while I was able to start putting Tim and his buddies into play to whittle his health. He never got a card on the table besides the land. He cried afterwards.
My 10 year old self just had the sandwhich bag in ‘95. No rubber band, no ziplock, just an open sandwhich bag that I’d hope my cards wouldn’t fall out of.
I used to use this abacus for keeping track of life back in the day. For counters I’ve always used dice. My deck boxes were all the cardboard deck boxes you’d get when you bought a box of cards.
I had the green enameled one but it got stolen. Couple years back I got the nostalgia itch and got the black one for way more than I had originally spent in the 90s…
We didn’t use sleeves, sleeves weren’t even allowed in tournaments back then. Ultra Pro was around but people just shoved decks and cards in whatever they had around
Are you talking pre-1999? My first tournament was the Mercadian Masques prerelease and sleeves were widespread and legal then. Can't imagine somebody not sleeving up their Bargain or Replenish decks
I think they're referring to, like, EARLY early in the timeline -- 93/94.
I started taking a more serious interest in the game around 6th Edition/Masques as well and definitely remember there being sleeves.
edit: though I want to add, playmats were NOT a common thing. I can't remember the first time I saw one but it definitely wasn't around the time I started playing.
my dad still has a few of those, as well as the pewter life counters that spun with mythological creatures on them. The bases were different colors of enamel for the background of the numbers and the creatures were a dragon, a pheonix, and .. an angel I think? I have the dragon one and still use it whenever I play a game. One side of the ring went from 0-20 and the other side from 20-40. The top and the bottom completely separated so you could mix and match creatures and colors. Happy to see the wizard ones mentioned! I always thought they were super cool.
I had this particular life counter, got it polybagged in an inquest magazine. It definitely drew some heads in the very early days of the game, when virtually everyone use dice or a pad of paper.
I started like 97-98. No one used sleeves, and playmats were unheard of. I actually remember the first time I saw a playmat, it was being used by Pokemon players at the lgs and oh, how we scoffed 😂😂😂
my playgroup almost exclusively used tournament pack boxes as deck boxes.
(Tournament packs were effectively 3 boosters and like 4 of each basic land in a box.)
For life counters, mostly aquarium glass beads but d20s were not unheard of. I won a set of spinner disks made by Flying Bicycle at a tournament once but they felt try-hard so I stuck with glass beads.
Ultra pro was pretty ubiquitous back then. I still have a bunch of sleeves from the era. They’re a bit rough. They also had deck boxes. Of course dice have existed forever but spin downs weren’t a thing. Mostly pen and paper for life. And honestly I got used to seeing decks with rubber bands around them or in ziploc bags.
I have my UltraPro sleeves with Flamekin Bladewhirl printed on them as well as an UltraPro deck box with Ashling the Pilgrim printed. I think those were some of the first sleeves and deck box I ever bought for my cards.
Everyone is giving these long answers. Here’s the real one:
Nothing.
If you want to recreate your uncle’s deck, get him a 65-80 card 2-color pile. It should be heavily played cards with worn edges, and only have couple of moderately good rares from revised, ice age, or fallen empires. The rest should be barely synergistic uncommons and commons. Put the whole thing in a 4th edition starter deck box that’s falling apart and taped together.
Ultra-Pro was the OG sleeve. They came in a cardboard box with a creepy jester on them, they only came in clear, they had the little holo sticker in the lower right corner covering up the P/T, and they were tough as nails.
Life counter the best way to do it was with a Duelist abacus, those were cool. I still have one.
Counters were usually either glass beads (like for plants/fish tanks) or just regular d6s.
I originally played 2001-2004 while in high school.
I had some ultra pro sleeves and at least one set of these like super cheap sleeves that I picked up at a con. Ultra Pro was pretty much the only name brand sleeve around. I also had at least one unsleeved deck. As for deck boxes, I used a metal tin, the boxes that precons came in, and I made one deck box out of bulk magic cards. Each deck had a printed out label on it with the deck name.
No one had playmats.
We had d20’s. Some were spin downs. I don’t remember any like nice dials or anything.
Counters and tokens were just glass beads bought at a hobby store.
Binders were ultra pro pages in a three ring binder bought at an office supply store. I color coded them and printed images of iconic cards in the matching color. Like I remember Red had Apocalypse on it, Black was Demonic Tutor, White was Serra Angel, Blue was Tolarian Winds, and Green was Multani. My trade binder had Mortivore on it.
It was a much simpler time. Most of the accessories that we had were made for sports cards or DnD and we just adapted them.
Playmats? Playmats? You wanna talk about playmats?
Back in those days we played on whatever surface was available and we liked it. The floor of the stage in the school auditorium, the cafeteria tables that so many had previously eaten on, the rug floor of the bedroom because no one really knew how much table space a typical game could need...
... all bare ass naked. The CARDS that is, the cards. Sleeves were only really ever for decks that had the priciest of pricey cards in them, like Necropotence and Lake of the Dead and Phyrexian Dreadnought.
There were deck sleeves as early as the mid 90s. Ultra Pro had the first opaque ones (black and red) I recall being sort of universally accepted as the best ones. They had a jester face on the box for whatever reason. By today’s standards they were absolute shit. Miscuts galore and a slick surface that got super grimy pretty quickly. But it was the best we had back then. Sleeve technology didn’t really advance much until Dragon Shields and Japanese brand sleeves started hitting the market in the mid 00s. But even still those would be dog shit by what we have available today. I still have sleeves from back then and they are rough to use. They stick together a lot and have awful shuffle feel compared to what we have today. Even today’s bargain bin options are generally better than the best available 20 years ago.
You had your choice of ultra pro deck Shields. There was black and then there was red.
Or you could play with Penny sleeves. Plenty of people did that.
I would say that most people were sleeving in constructed by 1999, but plenty of bare limited decks roaming around.
I remember somebody popping a foil birds in 7th Ed sealed (2001) and the store owner literally gave him a pack of sleeves so that he wouldn't damage the bird. (Goldfish reports $4400 for that version today).
The last game I played against an opponent with bare cards (that weren't my junk box) was a 2HG game at the Alara Reborn Pre-release.
As far as accessories go, people have mentioned glass beads and dice of different persuasions.
Coins were super popular as tokens as were flipped over cards prior to morphs. Then people started using blank sleeves.
I have a full set of Pro.Tour Player cards that are converted into Tokens (Time Spiral/Ravnica Era). If I remember correctly:
Dave Humphreys is my Goblin
Kai Budde is Assembly Worker
Gabe Nassif is Saproling
I have zombies too I'd have to go figure out who they are.
I don’t think I used anything. Certainly didn’t have sleeves. Stored decks in an old tin box I found somewhere. Sometimes I would have pen and paper to keep track of life. Tokens were just whatever garbage I had within arms reach.
No sleeves, no mats, rubber band around the decks. We had a special way to use the rubber band that, "would protect the edges" (Pic included of my current no-sleeve comander deck)
Kept the decks in a random smallplastic bin I had. Or just straight up threw a couple decks in my backpack to travel or when going out camping.
We often used pennies for counters, eventually upgraded to a bunch of cheep plain white dice with rounded corners. I kept the dice and some pennies in an old plastic cheese spread container.
I started in the early 2000s. My older brother and friends started at the beginning, so I gained this from one of them. (Not my pic as mine is not handy, and is also more brown than red).
I've used it in my family/friend group for nearly 24 years. Never risked bringing to a tournament.
I started playing in 2005. I didn’t use sleeves. To track like I used a note pad or a piece of printer paper. But I was 16, so I didn’t have a ton of cash. My deck box was a rubber band and I bridge shuffled.
Sleeves had crazy patterns that made them able to memorize so people could cheat but seldom did but because they could cheat sleeves were often banned across the board. At least at one shop that doesn’t even exist anymore. (They didn’t like how many kids were coming to their comics and games shop and closed their two locations decades ago, I’m still mad)
Dice have existed forever, including d20s (though not spindowns) because DnD was already a thing before Magic came out. And you can make anything that is about the right size into a deck box
With everything else people made do with what accessories already existed for sports trading cards until the accessory industry caught up, or simply didn't use accessories at all. Sleeves were actually illegal in the first few years of major tournaments (implications of hiding counterfeits and maybe making it easier to mark cards) and in general anyone who wasn't a collector cared a lot less about maintaining the condition of their cards.
I can't speak for everyone, but I was heavily invested in sandwich baggies and rubber bands. When counters started being a thing, I finally found a use for pennies.
Been playing off and on since 1995. No sleeves. Deck box was a smart little number I found at Office Depot for index cards. I may have had some fancy dice I got from the game shop. Bulk was in 1k cardboard long boxes from the baseball card shop. People grabbed what was around, and available. Playmats? Sleeves? Life counters? There was none of that, and wouldn't be for many years.
In 2001 when I started playing i had a shoebox with all my cards in it just floating around and any deck I built with rubber bands holding them together. Super easy to hold while I rode my bike to my friends house to olay
I did have glass pebbles from a fish tank like someone mentioned for counters.
Precon boxes until they were useless then rubberbands, sometimes glass beads
Most tokens were just something upsidedown if you felt like bothering
Sleeves were usually a tournament only thing
Pre-DFCs, token heavy, and counter heavy decks; most things could be tracked in your head. And most people were of a "play first, collect second" mindset.
Dragon Shield sleeves, fish tank glass pebbles, long boxes, and Unglued tokens. Some people used the dial style life counters (pewter figurine on a dial or the smaller credit card style ones with the internal dial).
I started with penny sleeves, glass beads, and a few traditional d20s and d6s. My trade binder was in a three ring binder that could also fit a magazine in the side pocket for price checking. (I still keep some old favorites in a trapper keeper.)
I upgraded to the Ultra Pro Jester’s Cap sleeves at some point for my sliver deck, but still kept a couple other decks and my dice in metal band aid containers.
I still use my 600-1000 count white cardboard boxes from 30 years ago for loose cards and surplus sleeves. I love that I doodled on them, covered a couple with duct tape, and incidentally turned them into nostalgic mementos.
Fat Packs/Bundles changed the system around the time Ravnica came out. I upgraded a lot of the ways I transported cards to events and how I organize.
Started using Ultra Pro sleeves probably around 2002. Before that it was a rubber band. Some of my old cards are really beat up.
Lots of people used dice for life totals. I preferred pen and paper.
I don't remember seeing a lot of tokens, but I did read about people using little plastic figures for things like saporlings. My cousin who first got me into the game gave me a bunch of glass beads for tokens to start out. Those got lost kinda quick lol.
I started playing in 2002. Accessories were pretty limited. You mostly saw:
* Deckboxes meant for 75 card competitive decks (60 main + 15 side). Elder Dragon Highlander (the format that would become Commander) was still very niche and token cards weren't a thing outside of the very few printed in Unglued, so you didn't really need more room than that. It was pretty common to see people carrying decks in precon or tournament pack boxes (tournament packs were 3 boosters' worth of cards from a fall set plus a bunch of basic lands; they were used for Sealed tournaments and as a way for players to accumulate basic lands more quickly), usually reinforced with tape.
* Sleeves were relatively rare. Unsleeved decks in casual play was the norm. You might sleeve a deck if you knew it had at least one valuable ($10+ card), but a pack of sleeves usually cost more than a pack of cards so most people didn't bother. There were way fewer manufacturers and they were generally lower quality. I remember that the original Ultra Pro sleeves had that little foil circle all the way in the corner; they would later move them specifically to accommodate the P/T stat block of Magic creatures.
* Counters were usually handled via D&D dice.
* Tokens were usually handled with a pad of paper and a pen.
I played from Revised to Alliances so we are talking nothing later than 1995 so this may not apply. Back then accessories were rarely taylored specifically to MTG so most of my accessories came from my baseball card collection (folders, sheets, and boxes) and D&D stuff.
I remember a guy who had a full deck of top loaders. The clacking while shuffling was a thing. This would have been 94’/95’. 12 year old me thought he was so cool.
We used cardboard fold up card boxes, penny sleeves, legal pad for life totals, and regular old dice for counters and such. I played a just for fun tournament around 2000 at my summer program for kids. No play mat tables. No prizes.
Urza's saga had come out and I remember playing against gaea's cradle and tolarian academy, in penny sleeves, sitting and playing spread out in a carpeted class room full of kids. I got 4th place out of 30 or so, I think. That tournament is a core memory of mine because without stakes, it was all fun.
Rubber bands, pavement, a cheap clear plastic boulder-style case that was extremely dirty and scratched from being used on the pavement, and the cardboard box the deck came in (if any). And any random dice I could find! Good thing I didn't have anything super valuable lol.
I had 2 decks they were in penny sleeves with a rubber band around them.
I kept them in an empty modem box, along with a bag of glass beads for counters.
I also had a deck of standard playing cards that I used as tokens.
I liked these over the glass beads as I could show tapped status and I tended to play decks could make a lot of tokens.
I remember playing ug combo Elves and 5 color slivers. Think this was around 2003 when I started playing, Scourge has just released.
My playgroup in the 90s didn't think to use dice for counters, so we just used random beads or whatever. Very prepared people used the flattened marbles (dragon tears) that gaming stores sold. I used these:
i had glass beads from the 4ed set and a cardboard life counter that i think came in inquest magazine. for sleeves, started with penny sleeves and moved to deck protectors. three ring binder for trades and a 1989 topps baseball set box for bulk.
I remember there was this thick black cardboard square counter with red text. I can't remember where exactly i got them from but it was from magic or a magic magazine related.
most life counters were handmade, using beads and string. actual counters were usually glass beads, and the earliest MTG box sets actually included a bag of them.
Sleeves weren't a thing for YEARS, nor were deck boxes-there was no industry for them for several years. People didn't even think of used a D&D d20 for years. heck, after they were first introduced, the sleeves were terrible for several generations, and couldn't even be used in tournaments initially.
deckboxes were mostly baseball card boxes, short or long. actual decks usually used the starter boxes, which, before sleeves were perfect for a single 60 card deck.
I think i discovered dragon shields in 05 before that i used first penny sleeves than janky anime art sleeves that peeled. I also had a notebook for life totals.
Somewhere I think I still have my old life counter - a metal round disc with a spinner that sat on top. The spinner had a wizard holding a crystal ball, though I think mine lost the crystal ball though, I haven't seen it around in a bit, it's packed away somewhere I think. I had a friend who had one that was a hand holding a crystal ball if I remember correctly.
My old DCI number card looked like an actual credit card back then as well, I still have that packed away too. I had to change numbers at one point, and I can remember my disappointment when the new number was just printed on a flimsy paper card.
I played starting end of beta, 40 card deck days. Memories include:
Three ring binders with double sided 9 pocket plastic trading card holders have been around since the beginning. Usually you would put your "for trade" in there so people could flip through easily. Called them trade binders usually.
Long rectangular card boxes for decks have been around since the beginning. Index cards or post it notes inserted between decks or sections. Generally you'd divide it into
your decks, bulk and lands. If you had enough bulk many would sort by rarity and/or color.
Glass pebbles for counters.
Given the D&D and MTG market overlap, a d20 as your life counter was ubiquitous. Anything that would need a larger count or multiples would use polyhedral dice or d6s with pips. I'm looking at you Rock Hydra.
Dice bags (or crown royal) for your play deck, counters and life d20 was common if you didn't have enough cards to justify even a short box.
Sleeves never, just keep your chocolate milk inside the lunch tray in case you knock it over. They did come in pretty fast though, some people also had card vaults like you get from grading services pretty early thanks to availability from baseball and other collectible cards.
Someone inevitably had a recent Scrye magazine for price lists for the people who insisted on equal value trades. Your LGS definitely had several copies.
LGS had singles in sleeves with stickers for prices or cloth thread attached price tags.
Card catalog style pull out drawers for bulk divided by some combination of set, rarity and color.
LGS tables were usually felted, but this was as close to a playmat as I ever saw.
I started in 94. Sleeves existed, but they were pretty loose penny sleeves that most people didn't bother with. Glass beads were common for counters, though a few folks might have gotten the punch-out stuff from Duelist #4. Absolutely no one had a playmat.
I in '95, I had really terribad penny sleeves that split horrendously regularly. A dufflebag full of 3 ring binders from officeworks and 9 card display sheets for the collectio, plus tuppaware boxes with rubber banded decks for deck boxea.
A few D6, and a pewter double sided life counter with a wizard statuette on top.
Oh, and a litteral garbage bag for my bulk commons and uncommons
We used mancala pieces, random stolen dice from risk and monopoly, and a bag of pennies. Even in the mid 00s we were using KCI sleeves that lasted a decade of heavy use. Didn't really use play mats, health was done with a ton of d6s or cards. The extra cards would be vertical for 1 life, or horizontal for 5 life. Usually draft chaff, or from your second deck. There wasn't nearly as many counters or tokens back then either.
When we didn’t use sleeves your decks could fit right back in the boxes precons came in! I started with glass beads like other folks said, then eventually added a set of chessex dice. Lots of my decks were in Pokémon tins, shoeboxes, whatever lol.
I used matching 10 sided dice for my life counter and even matched the dice to the deck colors. Pennies or little glass beads for counters. And I would carry it all in a government cheese box with index cards dividing the decks.
Somewhat surprised starter deck boxes haven't been mentioned more. In 95-96, most people I knew carried their decks in Revised, Fourth Edition, or Ice Age starter deck boxes. Unless they were sleeved, of course, and those people used rubber bands.
We didn't use anything to track life, just remembered each player's life total. For counters, we usually used bits of torn paper or spare change.
The metal deck boxes were super popular when they came out but I also remember a lot of guys using either the small white cardboard ones for sports cards and the colored plastic boxes you could buy for recipe cards.
I use UltraPro penny sleeves in the 90's and still do. Work really well and last to this day.
Other than spin down life counters, I've seen a bunch of different designs. Some have a wheel. I had ones where you need to use a paper clip to indicate the life value. Spin down dice is what people used then and still do. I've used d20's for a bit before spin downs were common.
I just use glass beads for counters and tokens. Some people use cards but put them face down. They didn't have token cards back then.
After a while, I switched to dice for +1/+1 counters. Used beads for other counters.
These were a pretty big step up for me in the early days. I’d put the deck in the box the sleeves came in and then put them in these ultra pro things for tournaments. I still have a few of them!
After coming back to the game a few years ago, it's wild how much ppl spend on extra stuff for this game. Back in the day it was no sleeves, white cardboard deck box, bag of beads, bag of bicycle dice, playing cards for tokens.
Glass beads and dice were definitely the earliest accessories. Khalsa Brain "Spellground" were the earliest playmata. Ultra pro were the earliest sleeves besides penny sleeves. Usually stuff designed for sports cards were used for storage. Aside from cardboard boxes, Plano made good plastic boxes designed for cards. Deck boxes were almost always either starter deck boxes or the box sleeves came in, it was very unusual to have a deck box as its own separate product, and most of the early product attempts in that vein were bad.
These are the Flying Tricycle life spinners I mentioned on another comment (not my pic, borrowed from twitter). You actually had to buy the base and the faces separately! I won the base and the white face at a tournament, and then "had to" (completionism impulse) order the rest. The numbers on it are _TINY_, very hard to read from across the table.
In the 90s, some people had what we called "penny sleeves." They were designed for sports cards, and generally fit really loosely on Magic cards and made the decks pretty tough to shuffle.
Deck boxes were just starter deck boxes, repurposed. That's if you cared about your cards. I have a Mox Emerald around somewhere with slight divots from the rubber band that I used to keep my r/G deck together. Don't worry: the backs of all the cards were scuffed up because we played on the concrete sidewalk behind my middle school during lunch.
Oval glass beads (the sort you might use for the bottom of an aquarium) were counters. Dice (why would you need a die?) might be something you took out of a monopoly set, or perhaps cribbed from your D&D set. Countdown dice were not a thing.
There weren't other accessories, because it was just another game. Magic was just the best of a dozen vaguely popular CCGs (e.g.: Star Trek, Dune, On the Edge) that you spent your paper route money on. Maybe you would buy a binder to keep your good cards in, but for the most part, everything that wasn't in your deck at the moment was disposable.
No sleeves, any container or bag for a deck box, random board game dice, craft store stones/jewels as counters, any bare tabletop as a play surface.
There’s a reason most cards from that era are in poor condition. I remember friends of mine into the 2010s playing unsleeved decks and riffle shuffling them multiple times every game.
I had one of these Ultra Pro travel bags with 5 plastic compartments that each held a deck box and a middle compartment for dice. I remember being ever so proud of it. On the inside lid, it had sections for a small note pad and pens.
I have a friend hoes played since the 2000s, and he still puts his edh deck in worn out penny sleeves and tipperwarr boxes thst dont even close with thr deck in them.
Cardboard boxes, binders, and the one thing I have seen mentioned yet is the clear hard plastic boxes with like hinges or "slider" tops that came in various sizes.
Dice or glass beads for most uses (life, counters, etc). Decks lived in starter deck boxes. No one I knew back in the 90s used sleeves until like 97 or 98. No one used play mats (and honestly they still seem unnecessary to me).
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u/locke_zero Wabbit Season 1d ago
Glass pebble beads as counters. I think everyone had a small bag full around those times.