As it is a scheduled holiday due to the celebration of the National Heroes Day (a Red date in our calendar). I decided to spend the extra rest day doing household work and laundry. Since the latter was already done last Saturday, the next task in hand is the room cleaning and arrangement. However, I am not fond of doing a sort of major cleanup as the dust can have me sneezing and activate my asthma. I still decided to have at least some kind of arrangement especially to my pile of cards that are loitering around my workstation.

I checked on the pile of cards and boxes including opened booster packs, some sleeves, and tokens and decided to have them sorted. My system is to divide them first by expansion and then followed by a sorting per color. I started with the War of the Sparks Japanese booster box and took out its contents and placed them on my bed. There were a few Rare cards left after opening the packs last time and so I just see if they are worth the money to be included to my card selling pile.  

I had a few boxes before that were labeled with the expansion name and symbol on its cover. Unfortunately, I got them disposed of when I transferred the boarding house. Here are a few tips on easy sorting your MTG card collections.

Sort at the Start – Pile them immediately by color when you open your packs like what you do doing Sealed events. I seldom do this but I highly recommend that you practice this one while you enjoy opening your booster packs.

Separate the Playables – I usually sort my cards so it would be easy for me to find them later on if they will be needed for my deck builds. While it might difficult to grade the card for its usability, you can start by basing it on the current format, for example, Standard. See how it will be useful in the current top decks or maybe a sideboard option in that matter. In that way, it will be easy to locate which box is for your future Standard components and which are not.

Arrange by Block – the Magic sets were released in the order that they will also be sorted. Arranging them by block is an easy way to know which set belongs in a particular group. This can then be followed by what I mentioned I did on each box, sorting by color and if needed by card name in alphabetical order.

Sort by Card Types – this is suggested if all your collections have already mixed up with the old expansions. It would be pretty hard to pile them by expansion and then by color. The remedy is to sort them by card types i.e. Creatures, Sorcery, Instant, Enchantment, Lands, etc.  You can have one box for each card type and make sure you label the cover.

Last but not the least is to use labeled bookmarks to separate the pile so you would know right on which side is your artifacts or multicolored cards when you open the box.

I do hope these tips helped you in organizing your collection. We are not only Magic: the Gathering but also prompt into an efficient organization as well.

Until the next post and thanks for reading.