What’s the best way to organize your cards?

It’s a common question for players who are new to their favorite TCG: What’s the best way to organize my collection?

• Should I do it by color or ABC?
• By Rarity?
• What should I put in binders?

The short answer is that there really is no “best way” to organize your collection. It is YOUR COLLECTION. How you organize and treat your cards is entirely up to you.

However, having them organized early will certainly help you find a specific card later in your TCG journey.

One thing you do not want to do is  open your packs and toss them unsorted in a box to get back to at a later time. While it might be okay first starting out, if you maintain this habit with every new set you collect, it will build up to a large mess that will take you hours, days, weeks or more to organize.

In my few years of TCG experience, I have tried a few different ways of organizing my own collection and even worked with the local TCG store. With that said, here are a few different approaches you can take when sorting your cards.

Sorting your Collection

For many players, the cards they keep will eventually be used for deck building, collecting, selling, or trading. Each deck will of course consist of various card types and colors. Because of that, you’ll want to organize your cards by color and type at the bare minimum.

1. Sort by color
2. Type: Creature, Artifact, Enchantment, Instant, Sorcery
3. Alphabetical

The first two will allow you to better navigate your collection when looking for particular card types that align with your deck strategy. Organizing alphabetically takes it one step further, making it much easier to find a specific card you want or one a friend is asking about.

Binders, Boxes, or Cases?

How you decide to store your collection again is your choice. Though I found that storage boxes work best for bulk, while using binders for the Rare, Mythic, and special print cards.

Cards that are valuable, hard to replace, or personally important to you may deserve a little extra protection. While it’s not required, it does help provide quick access to the valuable gems in your collection that could be traded in for extra cash.

I have also found utilizing hard-shell card cases for some of your more expensive cards to be very helpful. Though I would suggest restricting this to cards above your desired value. For example, my own card case holds cards worth over $20.00 that are not easy to replace if they were to be damaged.

You can also take advantage of placing the expensive cards in toploaders for better protection.

In short:

• Boxes for bulk
• Binders for rare, foil, or special printing
• Cases or Toploaders for the expensive.

At the end of the day, there really isn’t a wrong way to organize your collection as long as the system makes sense to you. The important part is starting some kind of system early and sticking with it. Your collection might only be a few hundred cards right now, but after a few sets, booster boxes, trades, and new decks, that number can grow surprisingly fast. A little time spent organizing your cards now can save you a lot of time digging through boxes later when you’re looking for that one card you know you have somewhere.