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The Issue

The Issue

If you have been collecting or playing Magic the Gathering (MTG) cards for any period of time, you've probably got plenty of MTG cards in many different places, and have real problems finding them and tracking down your cards!

I've found a wider system for selling off your spare MTG cards and earning some serious cash. This article is one of the key steps in that process, and is an overview of how to effectively sort your MTG collection so that you can fully understand and realise what potential you have in your collection.

The 5 Steps

Understanding what you have in your collection is so important for playing, collecting, buying and selling Magic the Gathering cards; these are the steps required to properly sort your MTG collection so you can understand what you have.

1. Put Everything Together In One Place

This step may sound simple, but find all your cards and put them all together on a big table - as simple as that. It's important to make sure you are looking at the whole story.

2. Sort by Set

The first thing to do with your collection is to go through the collection you have in front of you and sort your cards into Set. Firstly you should go through all your cards and sort these cards into piles. Each pile should contain all cards from one Magic the Gathering set - try to keep them in chronological set order. In other words, try to make sure that your piles of cards are sorted such that the cards from the oldest sets are first, and the sets with the newest cards are last. This is probably the longest step, but the most import.

3. Sort by Block

A Block in Magic the Gathering is a collection of Sets - group those piles of cards from one set into their respective MTG Blocks. This is best done with a list of all the MTG blocks to hand.

4. Sort by Rarity

Now that you have your piles of MTG cards sorted by set and block, we shall now sort your collection by rarity.

We are doing this so we can easily find your most precious cards, and most notably your mythic rares, rares and uncommons as these are your most sought after and valuable cards.

5. Sort by Colour

Now you should have a relatively well sorted collection, but to finish off the sorting, you need to sort those piles by colour within their respective rarities. Go through each card pile, and then sort your collection by colour within rarity (so sort all your mythic rares by colour, then your rares by colour etc.). The normal way to sort MTG cards is by the standard Magic the Gathering colour wheel:

- White - Blue - Black - Red - Green - Multicolour - Artifact - Land

Sorted - this should now leave you with a collection of Magic the Gathering cards which are nice and sorted, and easy to find anything you want.

Summary

Sorting your collection can take some time, but once it's done you are rewarded by a Magic the Gathering collection where you can easily find any card, and start to understand what is in your collection should you decide to sell cards from that collection.