Time to Get This Sorted Out

In the beginning there were cards

When I started to get into this process of sorting my collection I didn't know what I was undertaking as the project kept morphing as it went along and the scope changed a few time. I am sure I now know exactly what I want to do with this, for the fifth time, ok maybe I still don't know for sure but I have a good idea. The original idea was to revamp how I stored bulk rares to make it easier to find them. My original inventory was to have anything over $5 as a playset into a BCW 12-pocket binder that is coordinated by color, then anything under $1 where kept in the bundle boxes and scanned in, really with no reasoning behind organisation. The cards between $1-5 where in a box by color. 

Several things all came to a head at once that made me decide a new system of inventory was needed. Several cards in the bulk cards spiked at once, several decks where being created that needed cards from the bulk area, and as I went through sorting them I decided I needed a new way of organizing the bulk rares at the least. Now if you know me, I do not trade cards often so it didn't make a lot of sense to divide my hot cards and bulk so the first decision was all rares where going to be put together as well as a handful of uncommon and commons that where commonly played in commander. Since then my local playgroup has decided to get modern going again so now I had to put in even more cards. No biggie, I guess! I am currently finishing up Phase 2 of the project but before I get into that you should know what the different phases are, right?

Phase 1: A, B, C, D.... 

Phase 1 was probably one of the longest of this entire project. Technically this could have been two different sections but I didn't think of this handy phase idea to divide the project up until well after this, so that's why this is all one large cluster of work. The long and short of what I did here was to gather all the rares, staples, and cards I wanted into my 'Library' of cards, pull them out and beginning sorting the hell out of them. First was to sort them into the different colors, this was pretty simple, mind numbing, and luckily didn't take to much time. I was able to catch up on some TV shows while doing this. 

The next step was the longest of this project, sorting each color into alphabetical order, combine cards of the same name, and put them up. As I would go through the alphabet on a color I would place all of the different cards of the same name into one, sometimes more, penny sleeve to group them together. For this I bought A LOT of penny sleeves (well over 5000, I lost count) to put the cards into. Fun fact: you can fit 12 cards tightly in a startard UltraPro penny sleeve before it gets to tight. One thing I like about using penny sleeves is they will fit perfect fits as well for foils or expensive cards. 

This process took a couple months of working on it when I had time. I sometimes took them in the truck with me to work on, most of the time I was at my sorting desk in my studio watching a show or chilling in my chair with my doggo. There really isn't much to say about this, it wasn't difficult, it just took a long time and was mind numbing. 

Phase 2: Let's Delver into This 

With that complete I moved on to Phase 2 which was to input them into an inventory tracking program. I have been a fan of www.deckbox.org for a couple years so I decided to stay with them. The issue I ran into is they do not have a scanning function and would have to put them into the database a card at a time manually which was not going to work. So I had to track down a card scanner. Most people are aware of TCG Players app for scanning cards in which works great for pricing cards, but not really all that great for putting in a really large collection as the output is meh. Going through reddit and Google I discovered DelverLens. Playing around with it, I discovered that not only did it have a Bunch of options for exporting the cards that where scanned in, but the scanning feature is greatly improved in accuracy of recognizing cards and doesn't have an issue with foils cards, though it does have it's own problems. I'm going to write a stand alone article on DelverLens as I really do like the program. 

This part of the project took about a month to complete, working when I was able too. Each color only took me a few hours to do. I would switch from scanning to manually entering them in depending on what I was doing, this included pulling bundles of cards out and putting them in by set. This is where problem one showed up, DelverLens has an issue with extended art cards. It seems to do borderless cards just fine, probably because of the unique art. While this was a bit of a pain, it was only a minor one as swapping over from scanning to manually enter was a quick one. 

Phase 3: Box Em Up

So I finished up the last two colors yesterday and only have some alibi cards laying around to scan in and eventually sort into the main body of the collection before getting into phase 3 of the which is going through and reboxing my inventory into smaller salable boxes, primarily the 800 count BCW cardboard boxes. Why there and not a larger monster box? It comes down to storage of the boxes themselves and portability. While I need to double check measurments, right now you can tentitivly store eight 800 count boxes per cube of a Kallax shelf from Ikea if you pick up the shelf insert. That means I can give each color up to eight 800-count boxes, and only need to get the 8-cube Kellex to do this.

Right now the collection is housed in four 3200 count monster boxes. My original idea was to get a 3200 count box for each color to fill up as I bulked the collection out but in the process of moxing these half full boxes around I learned two very important things. They are damned heavy, and they take up a lot of room on your deck when you are trying to do things like inventory, or pull cards out to build a deck. It was at this point I decided I knew I needed to put them into smaller boxes. Also another perk I learned the hard was is the 800 count boxes seal by folding over, the 3200 count boxes do not and when your hyper active cocker spaniel decides to do a Marion impression and head bumps the bottom of the box moving at the speed of stupid can and will flip over and spill the content all over the floor (Morgan Freeman voice "This was when Larry decided 3200 count boxes wouldn't work").

So now I am waiting to put in an order for 64 800 count boxes from BCW, which is luckily 12 minutes down the road from my house, to begin swapping everything over into them. The 3200 count boxes will get repurposed into overflow for my commons for all t he different color as their 5000 boxes are now full and I need more space for them.

Until next time my fellow whales! Keep on buying!