Last week, I managed to find the time to open the 2 remaining Kaldheim Set Booster boxes from Magic the Gathering. Obviously, opening boxes is easy and doesn’t really take a lot of time. My daughter helped me, so I was able to go through the 60 packs in about 40 minutes by concentrating on the special cards only. We got everything on video; see link below. It was an amazing opening resulting in a total of 15 Mythic and 74 Rare cards! 😊 As a collector, I was extremely pleased and this more than made up for the mediocre Pre-release packs. If you count the time to setup for the video and doing some minor editing, the whole thing took about 90 minutes. I can always find 90 minutes in a week and most people should. So, why did I start by saying that I managed to find the time?
It’s simple, unlike my children who can simply open packs, take out the cards they want and leave everything else unsorted in any box that has room for them, before I even open the packs, I have to figure out how much time it’s going to take me to sort them all out. 60 packs x 12 cards = 720 cards to sort. And because sorting for the collection (to put missing cards in the binder) and sorting all the doubles are two different systems, it takes a lot of time. In this case, about another 5-6 hours.
I believe, just like my boys, that most people don’t take the time to sort all their doubles, so why do I do it? The answer is simple: for me, having boxes full of unsorted cards has no value and is a waste of space, but having them sorted in a way that makes it very easy to find any one card, adds enough value to be worth the space they take. But, that’s the collector and me and probably some minor form of OCD.
Follow-up question: why two sorting systems? The first one is simply numerical to make it easy to see if I have the cards in my collection binder already. If you’ve ever looked at the numbers, you’ll see that every set starts with the Plains cards, but you can find Plains cards in a few places in the sets. Sorting by number for this first step just makes sense.
The second sort is alphabetical by Mana type: Plains, Islands, Swamps, Mountains, Forests, multi-colors, colorless, non-basic lands and basic lands. And within those groups, I further separate by card type: Creatures, Artifacts, Enchantments, Instants and Sorceries. This system makes it easy to go through the cards if I’m looking to change things in my deck and to find any specific card someone might be looking for. If you ever intend on going back through your cards for any reason, then I would say the sorting time is worth it and will save you a lot of time in the future.
Next week I’ll write about Pokemon Go; that addictive game I started for my daughter over 3 years ago. 😊
This week on the Geek Family YouTube Channel we shared the video for the 2 Kaldheim Set Booster boxes opening and a video of me after cathing Pokemons in -30C weather.
The Geek Family Channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOKcZkv97rmReWerv2fVJ1Q
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Cheers!
The Geek Family
The Geek Family 