Review Summary: A storage box that is by far prettier than most items in your living room. You'd be crazy not to use it as an exhibition piece!
Blurb from the publisher: 'This is a huge storage box with a high quality image of Outer Space printed on the cover by UV printers. The e-Raptor Trading Card Storage Deluxe Box is a great product for all trading card games fans, who are looking for great quality and amazing design that matches their collection.
The box's walls are made of 6 mm first grade plywood. The cover and front are made of high quality white plexiglass with stunning artwork.
The e-Raptor Trading Card Storage Deluxe Box fits up to 5 000 sleeved cards! You can customise the setting inside as you wish with separators and dividers.
Standardized for cards with or without sleeves:
- Magic: The Gathering
- Lord of the Rings TCG
- Cthulhu CCG
- Duel Masters
- Pokémon TCG
- Yu-Gi-Oh!
- Veto!
- Digimon CCG
- World of Warcraft TCG
External Dimensions: height 14 cm, width 41 cm, length 42 cm.
Internal Dimensions: height 11 cm, width 39 cm, length 38 cm.
This box include 25 separators, and 4 vertical dividers. Does not require gluing.'
What you get: Your EUR 150 (!) or equivalent will buy you the e-Raptor Trading Card Storage Deluxe Box - Outer Space, a box with separate compartments to store truckloads of tokens, dice, cards or whatever else have you. The box is made up of seven pieces before inserting any of the separators. The plastic cover is not transparent while the separators are.
The cover is allegedly a picture taken from space. It depicts a sun rising behind a planet, which most likely is not Earth. There are all sorts of asteroids, nebulae and solar effects and auras, adding to a feeling of otherwordliness.
In the interest of full disclosure, and with the exception of its theme, this box is almost identical to the e-Raptor Trading Card Storage Ultimate Box - Dragon Guardian. The only difference between them is the frontal part of the box. It is wooden in Dragon Guardian, and a full-colour UV imprint here: the image of the upper part continues into the frontal part with more asteroids, an additional planet that looks like Mars, and even more spatial phenomena. In any event, if there are similarities between the two reviews, it's because of the similarities between the two products.
The strong points: I might no longer be surprised by the sheer volume of e-Raptor's Ultimate/Deluxe Boxes (their size is the same), yet these are exactly the kind of boxes I need. Reminder, we are talking about 16 302 cm3 of storage space, in what is probably the biggest, the most voluminous, the most impressive box with a gaming theme on the market. No need to discuss sturdiness; this box delivers and will keep its contents protected. The lid closes tightly, keeping the box's contents largely untouched by dust. This is extremely important for those of us storing sleeved cards. Sleeves don't get well at all with static electricity and the dust they attract.
That being said, and as I stated in the Dragon Guardian review, e-Raptor is doing itself an enormous disservice by naming it a Trading Card Storage box. I used Dragon Guardian to store dice, dice cups, dice pockets and all my dice-related accessories, while the present Outer Space box, with just a bit of bubble paper, went towards storing the bulk of my Star Wars: X-Wing and Battlestar Galactica - Starhip Battles minis. I didn't use any separators. The box worked great, and it really, really saved me space. That having been said, this is obviously an ad hoc solution that cannot be compared with buying a dedicated styrofoam box for miniatures.
The box is extremely easy to assemble, at least externally. If it takes you more than a minute (without the separators, of course) you are doing something wrong. It uses the standard wooden locks that e-Raptor uses in all its products nowadays. You don't need strength to make the pieces fit; just press at the right joints.
In case you don't want a box with a space theme, and Dragon Guardian is not your cup of tea, the box comes out in two additional flavors: Castle, and Dragon. I strongly recommend not to buy the same box twice, no matter how much you like its theme. You should be able to distinguish the boxes through their imagery, not through silly stickers.
The weak points: Once again, forget the box's full name. You can store anything in it, irrespective of whether it is hobby-related or not. I opted for dice. Others might go for manuals, or for other geeky paraphernalia just because. You can use as many of the separators as you see fit. If your needs change in the future, you can model the interior of the box accordingly.
Check the box's outer dimensions again, and you will realise that unless you have an ultra-deep, custom-made library or cupboard, this box will be protruding from wherever you want to store it. If you want it inside a drawer, it'd better be both lengthy and deep. On the other hand, this is a show-off box. It'd be plain dumb to store it inside a warehouse, a garage, or any other place where people cannot see it.
I would have enjoyed some means of securing the top when transporting the box. It does not currently lock even though my copy closes rather tightly. Should you have the box full and decide to move it without wanting to have all its components mixed, it is recommended to do so in its resting position, unless you are firmly holding the lid or you are using an extremely long and sturdy rubberband. Frankly speaking, this box is not designed for transportation.
If you are thinking of buying many boxes and stacking them on top of each other, forget it. I tried it myself now that I have two, and it simply does not work. The protrusions ensure that they will not stack safely, and that you will risk damaging them. The end result is quite unbalanced and prone to falling. As much as the box is mostly to be used for show (and not for, say, constant transporting of your accessories), it would have been more practical if it had no protrusions whatsoever.
The UV printing is fantastic, yet it is likely to get damaged rather fast. For the box to look cooler, a transparent plastic is inserted to screw above an ornamental protrusion. The open lid actively rests on it, and it is heavy enough to scratch itself due to its own weight. This should have been dealt differently. If you want to make the overprint last, you should under no circumstances store other items or boxes on top of it. The box is about serious storage, it is also however about showing off. Ruin the gorgeous surface, and what you basically have is a mostly wooden box with a plastic lid.
One hundred and fifty euro is a very high amount of money. You can always get an Ultimate box instead of a Deluxe one (that's EUR 25 less), or wait for e-Raptor's sales. If all these boxes are outside your wallet's comfort zone, make no mistake: you don't need them.
Conclusion: The e-Raptor Trading Card Storage Deluxe Box - Outer Space is not just the perfect box to store sci-fi related games and paraphernalia; it is actually an extremely cool-looking item to have in your house or apartment. The space it offers can only be compared to the space it requires, its beauty however is jaw-dropping. How many storage boxes can claim that?
To find out more about e-Raptor and the e-Raptor Trading Card Storage Deluxe Box - Outer Space take a look at http://e-raptor.pl.
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