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Over the last couple of weeks I have started to notice a rather unpleasant phenomenon, my Rainbow Foil cards have started to curve.

The cards have been on the living room table in our home and while the conditions may not be optimal I didn’t expect them to curve this much in just over a month!

I’m not sure if this is applicable to all Flesh and Blood cards, but it is definitely occurring with the Uprising cards in my case. Other words used to describe curved cards are warped cards, curled cards or “bent” cards. Interestingly enough searching for curled Flesh and Blood cards on eBay gives no results right now, however for Magic the Gathering you can find some curled cards if you check out this eBay search.

First I’ll compare my Flesh and Blood cards with my Magic the Gathering cards, then I’ll show some extra pictures of my Flesh and Blood cards and lastly I’ll talk about the consequences of curving and what can be done to prevent it.

Magic the Gathering comparison

When comparing my Flesh and Blood cards with my Magic the Gathering cards I notice that my Flesh and Blood cards are the ones that curve significantly more. Even though the conditions in our home are likely sub-optimal I still think it’s fair to blame the production process because the curving really is significantly more severe than the curving of the Magic the Gathering cards.

As you can see this stack of Dominaria United Common Foils barely curved in that month, whereas the Uprising cards curved a lot more.

In the last picture you can see that this only occurs for foil cards, non-foil cards have no curving issues. The reason for that lies within the composition of the front and back sides. For non-foil cards this is the same, but for foil cards the composition is different due to the added foil layer. Different compositions have different temperature and moisture characteristics, meaning that ultimately one side is more subject to curving than the other side.

A closer look at Flesh and Blood cards

The top-down view shows the curving even better, it really is quite severe.

Luckily curving does not appear to be a big issue for Cold Foil cards, as the Quelling Robe pictured below has also been in the same conditions for a month and seemingly has no issues.

What are the consequences of curved cards?

As far as I know there are no big consequences with this amount of curving, even if it seems quite severe. The cards will still fit inside toploaders or binder pages and can probably even be flattened with for example some heavy books on top of it.

Grading the cards should also still be fine, as long as they can fit inside the plastic cases. Though as a precaution I would try to straighten them before sending them in for grading.

How to prevent cards from curving?

I stored my cards in penny sleeves and just let them sit on the living room table for just over a month, in hindsight that was not a smart choice. I honestly just got preoccupied with mainly this blog and also some other life events and kind of forgot about them.

Storing the cards in either thicker deck sleeves, in a binder or in a toploader directly after opening is probably enough to prevent the curving from happening. And the cards which I directly stored into boxes and put in a closet also don’t seem to be effected by curving, so that is another option.