Sorting and Storing Your Magic: The Gathering Cards
Sorting and maintaining your collection seems to be a recurring topic on our server and most people seem to have a system that works for them. If you’re stuck or don’t know where to start with your collection or you’re interested in how someone else sorts and stores their cards, then this article is probably for you!
My household has two Magic players and we found out early on that keeping things neat and tidy was getting more and more important as the collection grew for both of us. What started out as one reused fat pack each turned into ‘the Magic cabinet’ a few years later.
Our collection is sorted in such a way we can find any card within seconds, which is a requirement we have due to the nature of how we play the game and acquire cards. Before we get to sorting, let’s figure out what type of Magic collection you have to sort and store.
Find out what type of sorting your collection needs
Do you collect to build or do you collect to complete?
If you regularly build and pull apart decks for several formats, your sorting needs will be different from someone who only plays a few Standard decks, or from someone that’s looking to own at least 1 of each card in a set.
Of these three, the builder wants to find any given card as easily as possible, the Standard player will want a system that allows them to store cards in sets of 4 and a system that easily adapts for rotation, while the completionist might be better off sorting their cards per set and collector number. Figure out for yourself what collection you are sorting for before committing to a specific sorting system.
How often will the cards in your collection change and in what quantities?
This will be a combination of several factors. How many decks do you regularly have assembled and how often are you making changes in them? Do you open complete booster boxes each set? Do you go to draft and sealed events? Are you buying singles? How often do you need access to your entire collection as a whole?
Do you build decks digitally and finalize a list on a website before you physically put together your deck? Are you the kind of person that wants to pull out 250 cards you like and are you going to have to trim those cards down to 100? All of these building and collecting styles will want a different way of sorting and storing their cards.
How much time do you have to maintain your collection?
And with that, can you bring yourself to maintain it consistently? There’s no use in sorting your cards if you know they’re going to be an unsorted box of random things within a few weeks again because you lack the discipline and time to keep your collection neat and tidy.
Maintaining a collection is work, and your reward is it being sorted and being able to find any card you need. If you feel that’s not enough payoff for all the work you’re going to put into sorting, why spend time and effort sorting cards in the first place? You’re sorting because you get to know exactly what cards you have and you can find them with minimal effort. That is your end reward - and that’s enough payoff for me, but it might not be for you.
How much space can you dedicate to sorting and storing your cards?
If you’re living with your parents and your personal belongings are limited to your bedroom, you’re going to have to make do with what you have. Someone else might have a dedicated board game room with floor to ceiling shelving and room to spare.
There’s no point in buying a storage solution you can’t properly put anywhere without it being in the way, and you’re not going to have a fun time sorting several boxes of cards at the same time if that means having to sacrifice your kitchen island or dining room table for several days because you have nowhere else to put your unsorted cards.
The type of collection I have
I collect to build
I go from having 6 to 15 decks assembled for EDH - this fluctuates a lot as sometimes I will build a deck, play it 5 times, and disassemble it again within a week. This means that cards I already own will need to go from being sleeved and in use to unsleeved and stored in an easy to browse box. I don’t want to spend more than a few seconds finding the exact card I need.
The cards in my collection often change in large quantities
I have 4 to 6 ‘easy to get’ beginner decks. I try to keep these Standard-legal and use these to teach the next generation of Magic players in my LGS every last Friday of the month. I go to most pre-releases at least once, and if my store offers sealed or draft I might sit down to play too.
On top of that, my girlfriend likes to buy boosters from random sets sometimes which we draft in-house, before dividing up those cards between the two of us. She dislikes sorting her cards, so I maintain both our collections.
I can spend 2 to 6 hours a week sorting my collection
This started out as a necessity early on because of the amount of events we went to pre-pandemic and has now turned into several hours of mindfulness for my brain. Sorting Magic cards gives me the same enjoyment as solving a puzzle, lining up at the archery range or beating a tough boss in a video game.
I have a lot of space
There’s a 4 by 6 foot furniture piece in my living room that’s slowly turning into a dedicated ‘Magic cards only’ space. On top of that I keep my computer desk as clean as possible, leaving me with a 3 by 6 foot flat surface of unused space I can use for sorting. I don’t have kids, siblings or parents to account for and my cats seem to be indifferent to cards being in various places.
I get very into everything I do
I’ll preface this with the fact that I go as far as to sort my basic lands per set, my tokens alphabetically and I even know exactly where my keyword-counter, art cards and ‘how to play magic’ info cards are. My empty sleeves are sorted per 100 and I know how many empty deckboxes I have available in which color and form factor.
I don’t expect you to copy my method step by step - I just hope seeing how someone else does it might incentivise you to finally tackle the hurdle that is sorting and maintaining a collection of Magic cards, and hope to provide you with some tips and tricks.
Our combined card count sat at around 20,000 cards before I finally decided to sort and digitize it all. They were pre-sorted by ‘his’ and ‘hers’ so this did cut the collection in half, which felt less daunting to start with at the time. Because of the size of the collection, and the need to find ‘any card, at any time’, I knew I needed to be thorough.
My sorting/storing method
1. WUBRGCMLT order - White, Blue, Black, Red, Green, Colorless, Multicolor, Lands, Tokens
2. Rarity - Common, Uncommon, Rare, Mythic
3. Type - Creature, Enchantment, Instant, Sorcery, (colored) Artifact, Planeswalker
4. Alphabet - including special symbols, more on that later
This means the first box on the shelf will be white common creatures starting with the letter A all the way up to Z, after which you’ll find white common enchantments, instants, sorceries, artifacts and planeswalkers, all alphabetized. Moving on to black and continuing on for the rest of the WUBRGCMLT commons. After that, white uncommon creatures and the entire sorting cycle continues.
Sorting your big mess into a smaller mess
I’m going to assume - and hope - all your cards are already facing the right way up and all front faces are facing you. If not, that’s your step 1. Continue reading when you’re done, and do yourself a favor and never put your cards away like that ever again in the future.
When sorting a large amount of cards, it’s often easier to sort them in small batches and make piles that work within your sorting system. For me, that means grabbing a stack of 60-70 cards and looking at nothing more than their relevance to my WUBRGCMLT order. Keep sorting until you have zero cards not in their correct pile. This is probably one of the fastest steps in the process.
What to do with cards now that they are sorted piles
I have several empty fat packs and plastic boxes available, and if I want to just do color sorting and nothing more, I can store my sorted piles in a dedicated box per WUBRGCMLT letter. If you have a smaller amount of sorting to do, a sorting tray can be useful too. The goal is to in the end always have just a small amount of sorting to do, since you’re obviously going to maintain your well sorted collection once you’re finally done with it, right… RIGHT?
From here on out, I keep the multicolor, lands and tokens sorting as the final part of the sorting process. Let’s focus on the WUBRG part of the collection first, as these will usually make up the bulk of a collection.
Rarity - Are you a lefty or a righty?
Left versus right handed fan. Note how the left side has the rarity symbol visible
The next step is to sort them by rarity. I will exclusively focus on one color at the time and have no other cards near where I'm sorting. How you handle rarity sorting will depend whether you are right or left handed. If you fan out your cards left handed, you’re going to see the rarity symbol more easily by default. If you’re right handed, it’s smart to turn your cards upside down, and then fan out like your cards like normal.
Not only does this provide you with easier access to the rarity symbol, you’re also only going to be checking for just that symbol, rather than reading the card name or ability box. It prevents you from getting distracted. When you’re dealing with older cards without a rarity symbol, put those in a separate pile. Reuse this method for anything that’s not ‘the norm’ moving forward. If something doesn’t fit the easy split second ‘this card belongs there’ bill, save those cards for later. The less corner case decision making you have to do mid sort, the better.
Take breaks and start labeling
When dealing with a sizable unsorted collection, I found having regular break points made it more manageable. Done sorting all your white cards per rarity? Great, that can actually be it for today, you don’t have to continue, if that’s all you had time for. Sorting your collection doesn’t have to be one big task that has to be completed in a single day.
It’s probably smart to have something you can use as a divider from this point onward. I use metallic purple sleeves for this purpose - they’re easily distinguishable from actual cards, unlike black or white sleeves that you may already have due to potentially clashing with the Magic card border color. Find a way to mark where one pile stops and another starts that works for you.
So what’s your type?
You should at this point have several piles of semi-sorted cards - be those in boxes, trays or just out in the open. It’s time to sort per type. I will again mention having just one pile of cards to focus on over an entire table that is your entire collection will likely speed up the process.
It’s time to train yourself to look at nothing but the type line. Everything on the card will want to grab your attention. Your brain will want to read the name, look at the art or see what the card does, especially if you don’t immediately recognize the card - and oh wow look at this power and toughness for its mana cost, why am I not playing this card?
All you care about is what type of card you’re holding. I sort mine in Creature, Enchantment, Instant, Sorcery, Artifact, Planeswalker order. This wasn’t always the case since ‘colored artifacts’ weren’t all that relevant up until the last few years. I realize my types themselves aren’t alphabetized because of this - I opted putting the small amount of colored artifacts right before my planeswalkers - and having my collection in Artifact, Creature, Enchantment, Instant, Planeswalker, Sorcery order is something I have considered before and I may do in the future.
Decide if you’re going to care about supertypes. I personally disregard whether a card is Legendary or not for sorting purposes. How do you plan to sort cards with multiple types like Bident of Thassa? What about MDFC cards? Are you going to sort your cards by mana color in the top right or do you want to consider color identity as well? Finding a sorting system that works for you means you’re going to have to decide what to do with cards like these. If you mainly play EDH, color identity sorting might be a smart approach.
A to Z, languages and Symbols
Let’s get to alphabetical sorting. Focus on one type of card in one color and rarity only. Note how your sorting piles are getting smaller and smaller - the fruits of your labor! Depending on the amount of cards you’re sorting, it might be smart to sort these in multiple combined piles. One pile can be creatures A to M and another can be creatures N to Z, after which you then sort each of those pile seperately.
Adapt this to a method that works for your current situation. If you’re right handed, fanning out 6-7 cards where only the first letter of each card is visible could speed this up since you’re only looking at letters, making your brain not read the rest of the card.
Decide early on how you wish to deal with symbols and foreign languages. Take a card like +2 mace. Do you want symbols to be before A or after Z or do you read it as Plus Two Mace? What if you own a foreign language card, where would you look for that? My +2 mace is sorted under the letter P and my Précepte d'Érébos is sorted under the letter D for Dictate of Erebos because that’s where I’d look for them.
And then the slowest part of sorting happens. A stack of 15 white common creatures all starting with the letter D. Enjoy going H-I-J-K ELEMENOPEE in your head until all the alphabetical sorting is done. Once you’re done sorting the WUBRG part of your collection, it’s time to move on to the CMLT part.
Colorless - Types or subtypes?
Let’s be clear on what I mean with colorless. Lands get sorted elsewhere. This leaves us with colorless artifacts and other spells. I sort these per type, subtype - artifact, creature, equipment, instant, sorcery, vehicle, attraction - rarity and alphabetically, even though only 6 colorless instants and 9 colorless sorceries exist at the time of writing this article. I want my collection to be futureproof. Which I thought it was, until attraction became a subtype.
Multicolor - Pick your preference
You can quickly sort a big stack of multicolor cards in a relatively efficient way. First separate them in piles of 2, 3, 4 and 5 colors. Then you can sort the 2 color pile in WU WB WR WG UB UR UG BR BG RG order if you wish to continue the regular WUBRG sorting method.
I quickly found out I have a heavy preference for ‘any multicolor so long it has black’ when it comes to two colors. Having my ‘two color cards with black’ in the front of the box makes for less shoving other cards out of the way that I currently don’t need.
There’s 10 3-color combinations, so you can sort those cards in the exact same way. 4 color cards are sorted by what color they don’t have, so no white, no blue, no black, no red and no green. Once the color sorting is done for all of the above, rarity, type, alphabet, just like everything else.
Some lands are more equal than others
My lands don’t follow the rules of my sorting structure. I don’t care about rarity, more about function. I also don’t keep Guildgates, Strixhaven Campuses or other ‘not great’ lands from drafting around.
My basics are stored in their own box, in WUBRG order, then per set, then per collectors number. When I need to find several of the same basic land for say: a Commander deck, and wanting the basics to be all from the same plane, this really speeds up finding the right cards.
Non basic lands are the first cards where I actually care about the ability box. Because most of what I play is EDH, these are sorted by color identity and what type of mana they can provide. Lands that only make one color go first, in WUBRG and then in alphabetical order. Then two-color lands using the multicolor method, the same for tri-lands, followed by ‘any color’ lands such as Command Tower, Exotic Orchard, and Opal Palace after which colorless lands are at the back of the box, alphabetically.
Alphabetizing tokens won’t cut it
While you can sort your tokens per type and alphabetically, you’ll run into issues. There’s an angel token that’s a 3/3 with flying. Or a 4/4 with flying. Or a 4/4 with flying and vigilance. All of these are just called ‘Angel’. What about the 15 different printings of treasure tokens? Do you care what the art on your treasure token looks like? Do you want to sort these per set? What about double sided tokens, dungeon, initiative, monarch?
If you regularly open packs or draft, you end up with a wide variety of tokens you may not even have a use for. I’ll be honest and say this is the least well maintained part of my collection. They’re sorted alphabetically and I’ve not given it much thought after that. They are however starting to take up a little too much space to my liking, making the box they’re in unnecessarily full and heavy. I can likely get rid of half my tokens, if not more, and downsizing my token box is definitely something I should spend more time on.
Everything is sorted, time to downsize
Now that all your cards are sorted, it’s finally time to look at your entire collection and decide whether or not you need all the cards you currently own. Do you need that 2/2 for 2 with an empty ability box? Are you truly ever going to use it in a deck? Why do you have several format-illegal cards in your collection if you’re only going to play one format?
I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to decide how much of your collection you’re going to keep before digitizing it, if you’re going to digitize it to begin with - more on digitizing at the end of the article. If you’re not sure you want to sell / give away / recycle some of your cards, you can always keep them sorted in your regular sorting order in a separate box and put that box ‘not with the regular collection’ elsewhere.
I have an ‘on their way out’ box with a piece of paper inside with the date I last took a card from said box. Should I need a card from that box, I write down which card, for what purpose and what date and put the paper back. If the paper gets noticeably full, clearly the box still had cards I wanted or needed and my original assessment was wrong. If nothing left the box in several months, then obviously they don’t need to be in my possession.
How to prevent a mess from forming again
Once your collection is sorted, it’s good practice to keep it that way. There are several low-effort things you can do to ensure it doesn’t become a pile again.
Have a dedicated space for (unsorted) cards
I have an empty fat pack with some empty sleeve boxes inside, at a fixed position on my desk, where I store cards that are waiting to be moved into the collection. Put this box in a place where you’d normally be handling cards in the first place. If all you buy is singles and these all arrive by mail, and you sort your mail at the dining room table, have somewhere to store your cards in that general area until you have time to sort.
Make sorting cards part of your routine
I usually sort mine on Saturday or Sunday and almost always after 10 PM. When I’m not expecting phone calls, when nothing in my household demands my attention and when I know I won’t be interrupted. Put on some relaxing deathcore and get to work ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°).
Sort in between other activities if you have limited time
I regularly watch what they call ‘second monitor’ content, where a video can be playing on your screen and you don’t have to actively watch it. The visuals aren’t all that important - it’s more about the context or the dialogue that’s happening in the video, I treat them more like a podcast - I sort cards meanwhile. Food is in the oven - it just needs 25 minutes, and a timer has been set. Go sit down and sort some cards.
If you can, sort cards the moment you get your hands on them
My sorting starts at my local game store. If I buy a booster pack, after opening it I instinctively sort it in the order the cards are supposed to go in my collection, before putting the booster pack away. If I play draft or sealed, in between rounds, I’ll sort the cards I’m not currently using. You’re using less than half the cards from your pre-release kit in your deck, they might as well get sorted so you spend less time and effort sorting cards at home.
I’ve had days in my LGS where after the draft I knew I wanted to keep ~10 of the cards from the draft and the rest was going to end up in the bulk box anyhow so I just asked if the other players wanted the ones I wasn’t taking home. More often than not, people will have kids that are glad to get their hands on any card. Preventing cards you don’t need from ending up in your possession stops your collection being ridden with cards you’re never going to use.
Be consistent in your methods
Are you going to sleeve all the rares and mythics in your collection? Make sure you have enough of the same sleeve at hand so the collection looks uniform. Do you only collect cards with high monetary value? Then you’re probably going to have to look how to store top loaders and what the best conditions are to store cards for long periods of time. Think about sunlight, humidity and the business side of things like security and insurance.
Is your collection confined to a few binders? Have all those binders be the same size/brand so they fit on the same shelf space. Don’t have multiple different locations where loose unsorted cards happen to be at that moment. The more you can make sorting cards routine, the faster it will go.
Items used for storage and sorting
Not sponsored - BCW Boxes. Our flatpack furniture allows for the 4 row BCW boxes to fit neatly, stacked on top of each other per 3 boxes. Each of these boxes holds ~3200 cards, depending on whether you sleeve your cards, what sleeves you use and how many dividers you have per box.
I taped some budget sleeves on the lid with double sided tape so I can change the list of contents quite easily. Prior to this I just wrote on the lid, and as you can see on the left side of the box, how I sorted my cards changed a few times until I settled for the current method.
My dividers are printed on card stock and in a sleeve. I found the dividers you could buy in most stores overly expensive or the graphics weren’t to my liking. I use empty deck- and sleeve boxes to pad out the box so my cards can sit as straight as possible. Taking out one deckbox then allows you to flip through your cards more easily and creates some space for you to browse your cards.
I bought plastic storage boxes that were to be the perfect size to sort Magic cards - the brand and model was on a label which I threw out years ago which in hindsight was not that smart, because I’d like to get more and I forgot where I bought them.
The inner parts can be taken out and it allows for a modular system of sorting when dealing with large amounts of unsorted cards. They make it so even while sorting, I’m not taking up too much space and I can clean up quickly when I want to stop for the day.
Digitizing
I took the extra step and digitized every card in my collection. This requires a lot of upkeep. If you struggle maintaining your physical collection, I wouldn’t digitize it. Any card going in and out of your collection has to be updated online. If you’re not diligent in this task, there’s no point in having the online collection to begin with. If your online collection isn’t 100% in line with the paper collection, what’s the point in having an online database in the first place?
Digitizing makes for a lot of extra work. If I bring my trade binder to the store, and I go down or up some cards, I have to track which cards leave and enter my collection. If I buy a booster pack on a whim, that’s 15 extra cards to input, assuming I keep all the cards. A draft makes for 45 cards, pre-release kits have 91 cards - and all of this has to be logged digitally.
I myself love digitizing, because at any given time I can see what card I own - be that on my computer or on my phone - which helps when going over trade binders, deciding on which cards to keep from a draft, and giving me an overview of which cards I own when working with a digital deckbuilding website.
I also don’t have to physically lift boxes and flip through cards to see what cards I own. My collection is stored online, and automatically backed up to my documents drive, which then syncs to my cloud storage. The thought of losing this digital collection - this happened once last year, prior to all my back ups and cloud based solutions - puts me on edge and in a state of dread immediately.
Find a website that works for you, and an input method that you can manage consistently. This will mostly be down to preference. I currently use deckbox because it’s what was available at the time. To me it’s important I can input cards without needing to use my mouse.
Every card taking 3 extra seconds to move your hand from your keyboard to your mouse to the right input field and back to your keyboard means you’re spending 5 extra minutes per 100 cards, which quickly adds up.
Moxfield also has a collection tracker, and seeing how all my deck building happens on their platform, the integrated feature of being able to see which cards I own while building my deck, instead of building a deck and then figuring out if I own the cards I want to play in the first place likely means I’m moving my collection to their website soon. I didn’t know about Moxfield prior to joining PlayEDH, and I’m currently using two websites that can each serve each other's purpose, so in the future I’m going to streamline that process.
If you can’t touch type, or the thought of typing in Magic card names all day puts you to sleep, there are card-scanner apps on both Android and iOS that allow you to just flash cards in front of your phone’s camera. You can then export this file in several formats and your card collection site of choice is bound to be able to import one of those.
If you made it to the end of the article, it’s time to go sort cards, chop chop. I know this article wasn’t about a new card, set or precon, like what we usually write about. If you’d like to see more Magic-adjacent articles like these in the future, let us know on Twitter or join our Discord and let’s talk!
PlayEDH interviewed Brian “BoshNRoll” Coval in our latest podcast if you're looking for something to listen to while sorting your cards!
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