What a card slab is, and what it protects against
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A slab is a sealed, rigid plastic case with a card locked inside it. The card is not glued or clipped — it sits in an inner holder that is then welded shut, so the case cannot be opened without visibly destroying it. That last part is the whole point.
What it actually protects against
Handling
Most damage to a card happens while somebody is admiring it. Fingers carry oil, corners catch on the edge of a table, and a card passed around a room comes back worse than it left. A slab makes the card handleable without being touched.
Bending
Card stock is stiff until it isn't. A sleeve does nothing against a bend; a toploader resists one; a slab is rigid in both axes and will not flex under normal handling.
Air and humidity
A sealed case slows the exchange of air around the card. It is not airtight in a laboratory sense, and no case will save a card stored somewhere damp, but it removes the daily fluctuation that curls paper over years.
Tampering
This is the part people miss. Because the case cannot be opened and closed again invisibly, an intact seal is evidence that the card inside is the card that went in. That is why graders use them — the grade would be meaningless if the card could be swapped afterwards.
Graded slabs and plain slabs are not the same thing
A graded slab comes from PSA, Beckett or CGC. It carries a printed label with a score, a serial number and the card's details, and that number is registered in the grader's database so anyone can look it up.
A plain slab — sometimes sold as a "card saver case" or "magnetic holder" — is the same physical protection with no grade attached. Anyone can buy them. Sealing a card in one asserts nothing about the card's condition or authenticity, and a seller implying otherwise is being dishonest.
Both protect a card equally well. Only one of them makes a claim.
What a slab does not do
It does not make a card valuable, and it does not make it rare. It does not reverse damage — a slabbed card with soft corners has soft corners forever, now visible from both sides. And it does not protect against sunlight: UV will fade ink through plastic, so a displayed card still wants to be out of direct sun.
How we use one
Every enavett card ships sealed in a slab, inside a display box. Ours is a plain slab, not a graded one — there is no third-party score on it and we do not print a number implying there is. We seal because the card is made once, from one person's photograph, and there is no second copy to replace it with if it gets bent in a drawer.
What does carry a verifiable claim is the code on the card, which resolves to a page showing the same artwork. That is a claim we can actually stand behind, because we are the ones who made it.
Read next
- How trading cards are graded, and what the numbers mean — what the number on a graded slab means, and what it is worth
- How to store and display trading cards — where a slab sits among the other layers