My incredibly frustrating experience with the Vault-X XXL binder for my Pokédex
This is just a rant. I was so excited to finally get my hands on the highly-touted 1088 pocket XXL binder for a Pokédex. I have other Vault-X binders and love them.
I immediately start picking out bulk, sleeving up, and putting the cards in. I notice the pockets in this one are significantly larger than the other binders I have from them (the 4 and 9 pocket). With the previous binders, I couldn’t use the usual Ultra Pro penny sleeves as the pockets were always too short in height to fit the taller sleeves. I always had to go with Fanatics or Vault X usually due to their smaller size. This is what I still had on hand, and this is where the problems started.
At first I thought “wow these pockets are really big for Pokemon cards and feel very loose compared to previous binders. I didn’t notice the main issue of this until after I had inserted 900+ cards and opened the binder back up. once I opened it back up and started looking through the pages……..cards were sliding out of the pockets all over the place! I thought “WTF I thought side-loading binders are supposed to prevent cards from coming out!” I was PISSED! I then proceeded to remove all 900+ cards and re-sleeve them into the taller/larger Ultra Pro sleeves, hoping this would prevent them sliding out. I spent another $15 on 1000 new sleeves, spent forever doing the binder again and……….cards are still sliding out, albeit not as many as previously. I even switched to mostly holo cards and double-sleeved some hoping the thickness might make a difference. It did not.
I reached out to Vault-X customer support asking if this was a possible defect in production, as these pockets are very different from their other binders, and you shouldn’t be “required” to sleeve cards to prevent them from sliding out, let alone have sleeved cards just fly out all over the place. I even included pictures of what was happening. It felt like an AI corporate Kool-Aid drinking robot was responding to me. The rep said I should try to not flip through pages rough, using competitor sleeves can exaggerate cards sliding out, use Vault X sleeves, it’s not defective, etc. It seemed like a blame game. I told them I’m not handling it rough, I used three different sleeves, including Vault X and had the same issues, I double sleeved cards, etc and nothing helped. They passed me off.
Now here I am wondering if I should buy another, find a different brand, or just go back to good old-fashioned Ultra Pro Platinum pages in a 3” d-ring binder, where I had all types of cards in for 30+ years with ZERO issues of damage or cards falling out the top.
TLDR: Can’t find a solution for cards sliding out of Vault-X binder and their customer support offered no solutions.