I mean, isn’t it obvious?
If you’ve played Magic: the Gathering for a little while (or any collectible card game for that matter), you’ve likely run into this situation: You’ve just had an idea for a new deck, and you realize you already have a good portion of the components to build it, just sitting somewhere in your collection!… right. Your collection. Piles of boxes of random cards, in random orders, with no clear idea as to what has gone where over the months, maybe years of collecting them. With enough searching, you’ll eventually pick out everything you need, but you may end up going through the same boxes multiple times, having to sift through hundreds of cards just to get to the one that you hope might be in there. If not, well, onto the next pile of unsorted cards.
Maybe this doesn’t describe you. Maybe you have a system, which works and which you keep updated. If so, I say congrats! It’s really something to be proud of. If your cards are sorted by color and by alphabet, then you can basically know exactly where any given card is at any point, so long as you have a copy of it. The freedom of being able to locate your cards makes one feel as though their bulk of burden has transformed into wings with which to carry them soaring into smooth, unhindered deckbuilding endeavors. If you’re like me, you know that this freedom comes at a cost – the cost of many hours of manually sorting one’s own cards. While this can be relaxing for some, the process can feel like the most painstaking tedium to others – a complete waste of one’s precious little free time.
It took me hours to do it with my whole collection of over 9,000 cards.
But when I did, I felt like I finally had a collection again. Before, it felt as though my cards were basically inaccessible – I had an idea of the cards I had, but I couldn’t ever justify putting in the effort to finding any of them. The rare ones, of course, got their places in my binders, but the rest were left to gather dust in the bulk boxes. Even very good cards, which simply didn’t catch my attention when I cracked the pack that held them, were left tragically unused.
Well, that was then. Now, not only do I know where every card is, I also know exactly which ones I have. I not only sorted them in a system that made sense, I also uploaded each of them, one-by-one, into Moxfield‘s database (a process which the alphabetization and color-sorting helped immensely with). Now, I can look up cards by name to see if I have them before putting in even minimal effort towards digging them out of my collection! This also has the benefit of being able to search through your own cards using Scryfall syntax. For those who don’t know, this means I can search for cards using almost any criteria at all – Mana value, color, type, subtype, rules text, and even things like the artist, or what set a card is from.
I can find cards that clear the board, I can find cards that counter my opponents’ spells, I can find cards that draw me more cards – all without even knowing them by name. And, after I know their name, I can find them in seconds, because I know exactly where all the cards are. Sounds nice, doesn’t it?
It has unleashed a new era of deckbuilding for me. It has also given me a profound sense of pride, rather than shame over the unsorted cards looming over me like a twisted shadow. My collection wasn’t just chaos – it was a collection again.
So, if you have the time, and want to feel the same way, sorting your collection is a journey that I wholeheartedly recommend going on. I will publish a guide on how I did it at some point in the future, to give more clear help on the most efficient way that I think it can be done. However, if you’d rather not spend all that time sorting through cards, I am running a service – for a reasonable fee, about $10 for every 100 cards – I will sort your bulk. It’s a new business model I have been thinking of. Ship me your cards, unsorted, and after a brief processing period, they will return to you in an organized fashion. You will also receive a digital list of every single card, so you will be able to feel all the same freedom that I do. You can upload it to Moxfield, or any other service, or even just keep the file on your computer.
On top of the other benefits, this process will help you get an estimate for the total value on the cards in your collection, as well. This comes at no additional cost! By the way, prices will increase as people gain trust in my business. For now, things are very cheap, because I understand that people may not feel comfortable shipping away their cards to a fresh-faced businessman like myself. However, I fully intend to treat every card with the utmost care, and to prove to the Magic: the Gathering community that I am interested in providing a service for the benefit of it. The benefit to myself of establishing such a business is far more valuable to me than any cards I could pilfer through a dishonest scam method.
Contact me at my discord, gamerandrew, or my phone number, (603)400-9970 if you are interested in this service I am offering. We can discuss specifications to your request, and you can ask me any questions you’d like.
My discord profile
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