Topic: How do you store your collection?

Hello everyone. I have been collecting MTG off and on for most of my life. I started back in Ice Age back in the 90s, but like a silly child sold all of those cards. In college I picked up collecting again but now that I have disposable income I am wondering how everyone organizes everything.

I have several boxes and I just joined deckbuilder.org and I plan on cataloging all my cards. I don't have a ton of cards, perhaps 3,000 by rough guess. I know many people have much much larger collections.

So what do you do? Do you have any good advice for someone who really wants to up their collecting game?

Thank you.

Re: How do you store your collection?

Look at some of the Tolarian community college youtube video for choices of binder, sleeves  and deck boxes.

BCW supplies cardboard boxes are good because they are acid-free  if you want to keep the cards in good state for over 20 years.  I used the 1 to 4 rows boxes and a lot of people will recommend the hotel.  I find the 5 rows one a little fragile for the weight it holds. There is nobody that make commercial furniture targetted to people that have tens of thousands of cards so at some points you will begin to scratch your head if your collection grow. Wood is not acid-free, metal is harder than the cards so they will scratch them slowly or make dent.  I have an old metal drawer postal style library that contains around 40 000 cards so I need to put cards in sleeves if I put them there. 

If you classify your cards by set, color, name  you will move them less often. You have to enter the revision of cards in your decks so when you search a card in your inventory  you know in which set you still have copies of the cards or you might have to look at some boxes. This is the preferred way of many players
If you classify you cards by color, cost, name you row will be filled more often and you have to move cards from one row to another but when you search a cards there is only one place it can be.

Re: How do you store your collection?

scramasax wrote:

If you classify your cards by set, color, name  you will move them less often. You have to enter the revision of cards in your decks so when you search a card in your inventory  you know in which set you still have copies of the cards or you might have to look at some boxes. This is the preferred way of many players
If you classify you cards by color, cost, name you row will be filled more often and you have to move cards from one row to another but when you search a cards there is only one place it can be.

I second this advice. Basically, it comes down to two things: 1) how you prefer to browse your collection and/or build decks, and 2) how much you plan to expand your collection.

To the first: If you prefer doing it by flipping through physical cards, then using an organization that lends itself to your needs is best. Opinions vary, but some people like sorting by color first, either just by the card's cost, or by its color identity. They then might have secondary and tertiary sorting within each color (I've heard of people using card type, CMC, even rarity). Some like sorting by card type first, keeping creatures and instants separate, for instance. Basically, it should mirror your deck building process. Do you like to start with a mana curve in mind, and need your cards sorted by CMC? Do you like to build commander and need to focus on specific color identities? Etc.

If you prefer doing it on a computer, then it's best to sort your cards by set first, secondarily by collector number. This is me. I don't have good eyesight, so I like the ability to zoom in on cards and lists. I'd rather do all the work virtually, and only when I'm ready to actually put the deck into sleeves do I print the list (sorted by edition) and go find the cards. By having my physical collection sorted by edition, it's super fast and easy for me to grab the right box, flip to where the card's sorted within that edition, and take it out. Similarly easy to put them back. Yes, it can be a little annoying if I need e.g. 4x Llanowar Elves, but only have 1-2 from each edition I own, as then I have to grab from multiple editions. But I find this an acceptable tradeoff for all the benefits this system gives me.

To the second: If you plan to keep a small collection that's focused mostly on cards you'd actually use in decks, then a deck-building-first approach is probably perfectly scalable and sustainable, and will be most user-friendly. The main drawback of sorting cards by color / card type / etc first is what scramasax said -- you end up having to reorganize the contents of your boxes and binders much more frequently. But if it's a small collection (and yes, 3k cards is pretty small in the grand scheme of things), that's not really that painful.

If you want to expand your collection to owning copies of cards from a set just to have them, whether for full blown "set collecting" or something more vague like "all the art I like", and you think you'll cross over into the 10k and up range, then sorting by edition first starts becoming MUCH more sustainable. Again, this is me. I have 30k something cards, and I can't imagine trying to keep up with non-edition groupings. The only cards I don't have in my edition boxes are the "money cards", which I've pulled out and keep in a safer place. But these are still sorted by set / collector number within that storage system, so when I go from Deckbox to boxes, I'll know where to find it regardless.

Hope this breakdown helps give you a direction to try!

Re: How do you store your collection?

I think there's some solid advice in this thread already, but I thought I'd add my two cents with regards to a collection that's currently reasonably small but might grow much larger (this is where I started and where I ended up). My collection is ~35k cards now having started in Kaladesh block and there's only one way that I can feasibly deal with that quantity of cards - stored by set / collector number.

I have all my cards entered into my Deckbox inventory (the correct printing, including all basics). I do the vast majority of my deck brewing (mostly for EDH) digitally, either looking through my own inventory on Deckbox using the built-in filter or by looking around on Scryfall/EDHREC and then comparing the cards to my inventory. By doing so the only time I need to find a card physically is once I've decided I want it in a deck. With 35k cards, doing this is absolutely trivial when they're in set/collector number order and despite the size of my collection I can locate any single printing of any card in my collection in under a minute.

All of my cards are then stored in this way in drawers with dividers between each set. The sets are kept in chronological order of their release (another way I can locate a set easily, as I can look up when it was printed if I need to). I used to keep these in boxes, but as the collection grew I started to use some more specialist drawers. My tokens and basic lands are still kept in boxes elsewhere rather than all together as there's so many of them, but all the main cards are in these drawers. I've put a few photos, below.

I have a slight complication to add to this for my personal collection - for all the standard legal sets between Kaladesh and M21 I wanted to have "one complete set", i.e. one of each copy of the cards in those sets (excluding masterpieces, and later on, excluding all the individual alt-art cards. More on that below). For these sets I keep one copy of every card in a folder/folio as a "complete set".

Lastly, I do use my cards to play EDH, so I have around a dozen double-sleeved decks in deckboxes that I keep in a cupboard nearby. Thankfully Deckbox pro lets me assign a specific printing to my deck lists, so when I look up, e.g. "Lightning Greaves" I can see which printing is in what deck, and then I can work out which printings are not in a deck and then find a copy for a new deck if I need one.

Overall this method takes some admin. As an example right now I still enjoy cracking the odd box here & there so I'm currently having a break from putting a whole box of Timespiral Remastered into collector number order. However, once that's done, it only takes me about 15 minutes to add it all to my Deckbox inventory, then I can just plop it into a drawer and it's done. Those cards are available and easy to find whenever I want them!

I'm a strong proponent of Set/Collector Number order and, for me at least, no other option would work.

Images here in IMGUR: https://imgur.com/a/RwrmEva

Edit to add: Since WOTC decided to start printing hundreds of alt-art cards and collector boosters, etc. I decided it was time to stop trying to collect one of every card in each set that gets released. I still buy all the commander precons and I still like to crack packs on supplementary sets, but I've given up trying to keep up with collecting everything because it was just getting out of hand in both money and storage space! It's both a bit sad and a bit of a relief not to have to try and keep up any more....

Last edited by Hamish (2021-03-22 16:25:01)

Re: How do you store your collection?

Hamish wrote:

Edit to add: Since WOTC decided to start printing hundreds of alt-art cards and collector boosters, etc. I decided it was time to stop trying to collect one of every card in each set that gets released. I still buy all the commander precons and I still like to crack packs on supplementary sets, but I've given up trying to keep up with collecting everything because it was just getting out of hand in both money and storage space! It's both a bit sad and a bit of a relief not to have to try and keep up any more....

Get out of my head!! LoL. But seriously, you've put to words what's been in my head for a while now. Sorry OP, a little bit of a tangent here.... I think I fall more on the sad side of it. Or perhaps frustrated. Because other than the extended art cards (not the borderless alt art ones; just the stretched normal art) which I find utterly stupid, I actually do still want to get all the cards! Especially some of those showcase frames -- I looooved the Eldraine and Kaldheim styles. But like you said, it just feels unfeasible.

WotC started this new era of Booster "Fun", with a lot of it aimed directly at collectors. Well, I can tell you, as a collector, it has made collecting completely UN-fun for me personally. I had a lot more fun and fulfillment in the "old" days. Now I'm just.... weary.

Re: How do you store your collection?

This is a good question that comes up constantly. There are a lot of possible methods, but one of the most important things is to recalculate every couple of years and make sure that how you're currently organizing still makes sense to you. It depends a lot on how much space you have, how you're trying to organize, your collection goals, etc.

When i started i stored all my cards in booster boxes. Then i got some 1k card BCW boxes. I've been using 5k card (5-row) BCW boxes for about 20 years now. They're the densest storage method I'm currently aware of, which increasingly matters as your collection grows. I'm lucky to have the right space for the 5-row boxes which would otherwise be a little unwieldy/bulky, and they've survived multiple moves in that time.

In regards to WotC's recent printing policies... not only are they starting to print a million variants, but they're also RE-printing a lot more than they used to. A definite advantage to cataloguing your collection is to make sure you're also not keeping too many of any one card. I'd suggest not keeping more than one playset of any particular edition of a non-reserve-list card. You can use the Card Database which will list how many of each card you have in the left-hand column.

Good luck!