I understand what you mean by having the cards there to touch. I play a trading card game called Magic: The Gathering, and I know this will sound like some "Heart of the Cards" crap from YuGiOh, but I always did better when I had the tactile sensation of my own cards. I'd often play online with a program called Apprentice, which is essentially just an interface, it doesn't enforce rules or anything, which is good because they don't need to make radical updates when a new edition is released, just update the card database. Anyway, back to the point of my story. I'd always put the decks I'd built in reality into the program, so I could use them online too. Not only in their real form, but in the idealised form, the way I'd always intended the deck to be, but never had the cards to make. Now, theoretically, the identical deck should have played the same, and the idealised deck should have been superior, but I always performed far better with my own cards. Even playing with a generic (over the shelf, preconstructed) deck that someone else owned felt like wearing someone else's skin, even if I owned the same generic deck. So, long story short, I understand the attachment a person can get to their own cards, and I much preffer the tactile sensation of having them there in front of me
