As a physical card game, unfortunately, Magic: the Gathering isn’t immune to production mishaps. Unfortunately, due to factors such as the COVID-19 pandemic, this issue hasn’t been an uncommon sight throughout recent sets. In 2022 alone, we saw countless misprints, miss-cuts, and products being delayed thanks to production issues. Some of these products were even delayed for over a year, something that, worryingly, could be happening again. As much as Wizards has faced their fair share of troubles throughout recent years, they’re hardly the only ones. MTG accessory manufacturer Dragon Sheid, for instance, has recently owned up to its own production mistakes, vowing to do better.
Suspect Sleeves
Compared to the frequent complaints surrounding card quality woes, Dragon Shield’s missing or damaged sleeves are a rather minor problem. That being said, however, occasionally posts highlighting missing sleeves or quality errors do make the rounds of social media. Refreshingly, however, for Dragon Sheid, even these rare murmurings aren’t to be ignored. Subsequently, the manufacturer recently addressed the problem head-on, acknowledging their mistakes while promising improvements.
“We take note when the community starts making rumblings about the quality of our sleeves. Sleeves will split or break once in a while, even when forged by dragons, that is inevitable. However, such cases are the rare exception, 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 start investigating.”
Dragon Shield
Within their post, the team at Dragon Shield explained how, following recent complaints, they “identified a malfunctioning enchantment on one of the machines our dragons use to forge sleeves.” In non-magical speak, due to a faulty machine “sleeves of a weaker quality became much less rare.” Alongside this sometimes packs would leave the Dragon Shield forge while containing too few sleeves. Obviously, considering players purchase sleeves to protect their decks, these faults are the opposite of what players want. All the more so during competitive events, where damaged sleeves can result in game losses, or even disqualification if the issue isn’t rectified. Due to this, quality issues are something that Dragon Shield takes very seriously.
“This inconsistency is of course 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. Therefore, – beyond fixing the malfunctioning enchantment – we are doing two things to rectify this.”
Dragon Shield
In order to make sure that this kind of production snafu doesn’t happen again, Dragon Shield has “increased our quality control efforts, now even further.” While this should ensure similar manufacturing mistakes don’t get into customers’ hands, Dragon Shield noted they can’t guarantee perfection. After all, since testing a sleeve for its strength is an inherently destructive process, every single sleeve can’t be tested. Despite this, Dragon Shield states they will be “testing even more sleeves to ensure that you can feel confident choosing Dragon Shield in the future.”
Reasonable Reparations
According to Dragon Shield, “the vast majority of Dragon Shield sleeves are still the high quality you know and love, only a small amount of boxes are impacted by this issue.” Subsequently, Dragon Shield won’t be recalling any of the boxes they believe to be affected by this production problem. Instead, the company has vowed to “take care of” customers who are “unlucky enough to get a box impacted by this.” If you’re one of those unlucky customers, Dragon Shield states you can “roar into the aether and our dragons will hear you and take care of you.” Alternatively, affected customers can contact the company online to receive support.
While Dragon Shield has not stated exactly how they’ll “take care of” affected customers, refunds or replacements seem likely. Through these actions, the company hopes MTG players will “continue to feel confident in our sleeves in the years and decades to come.” Thankfully for Dragon Shield, it appears they’ve already succeeded in doing just that. By addressing the problem head-on and communicating clearly, bar the magical jargon, players across Reddit have warmly received this message. Reddit user u/ripleyajm, for instance, commended Dragon Shield for admitting their own mistakes before being swept up into controversy.
“Gotta respect a company for owning up to their mistake and not only promising to improve but make it right for those affected. Yeah, it should be the standard, but under capitalism, it usually isn’t.
I got two bad packs of sleeves a little bit ago, but I let it go because I’ve been using DS for a long time without issue. Gonna send an email and hopefully get them replaced. Won’t affect my decision to keep using dragon shield for the rest of my day.”
u/ripleyajm
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