Where does it end?
Posted: Thu May 06, 2021 7:09 am
As I occasionally mention/brag about, I keep a singleton "commander collection" so I can build whatever I want, whenever I want. This does a great job of mitigating my EDHD and allows me to build decks around brand new commanders very quickly, all of which is great.
My policy has generally been "if a card belongs in any optimal commander deck, I want it." This means that Flying Men is in there because it's good in Edric, Spymaster of Trest, Saltskitter is in there for Ephara, God of the Polis, and a bunch of copies of Persistent Petitioners for that deck. My collection is in BCW 930 ct boxes, sorted by color and land/nonland but otherwise mixed. I've considered sorting more precisely in the past, but sorting by any objective quality - CMC, type, etc - doesn't really have much actual utility, and sorting by function tends to get muddy with multifunction cards, how many functions exist, etc. And any sorting drastically slows down the disassembly process for my decks. So they're only sorted by color.
Unfortunately, I'm coming to the end of an era: specifically, the era of 2 boxes per color. Blue and green are well past fitting into 2 boxes, and black is borderline. White and red have a little room to go, but not much, and WotC has a bad habit of printing new good cards. Two boxes each works out to roughly 1000 sleeved cards per color, not including multicolor. So I have dilemma - do I buy more boxes, and let my collection keep getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger? Or do I try to find a way to cut down?
The gut-reaction thought I had was "well, I could just cut down to the top 1000 cards of each color, and replace cards instead of adding them." But that gets a bit dicey. For one thing, there are a lot of cards that are strong but niche. Just about every tribal card is only good in its own tribal deck. All the "you may include any #" cards are taking up an increasing amount of space. I need enough regular basics, and snow basics. At a certain point, you're choosing between which archetype gets to be supported, and which don't. Also it gets way more annoying to add cards. It's one thing to pick out the playable cards in a set and acquire them, it's another to sift through my entire collection and compare all of them to the new recruits to remove an equal number.
Continually expanding isn't so bad, although the collection is a bit of a burden when it comes to relocating, something I do relatively often. But I think a bigger problem is that it keeps becoming more and more unwieldy to build decks. Monocolor isn't so bad, but making a 3c or (god-forbid) 5c can get pretty excruciating. Adding more boxes is just going to make things even worse as time goes on.
One middle-of-the-road option I've considered is to pull out the niche cards, the flying men etc, to reduce the main boxes down to a more reasonable count. Unsleeved cards take up less space, and since I'd be using them less often, I could take some time to sort them into archetype/function without needing to spend a bunch of time re-sorting them every time I disassemble a deck, aside from the handful I might use. However, this has some trickiness too - I'd probably want to have some method of identifying which cards go to which category, to make disassembly easier. With sleeves I could just use a slip of paper or something, but outside of a sticker (which could damage the card) idk how I'd manage for unsleeved cards. Ofc, I could just sleeve them, but then they'd take up a lot more space.
This is a fairly rambling post since I'm kinda just spitballing ideas at this point. Sorry about that. Has anyone else run into similar problems? And if so, how did you solve it?
My policy has generally been "if a card belongs in any optimal commander deck, I want it." This means that Flying Men is in there because it's good in Edric, Spymaster of Trest, Saltskitter is in there for Ephara, God of the Polis, and a bunch of copies of Persistent Petitioners for that deck. My collection is in BCW 930 ct boxes, sorted by color and land/nonland but otherwise mixed. I've considered sorting more precisely in the past, but sorting by any objective quality - CMC, type, etc - doesn't really have much actual utility, and sorting by function tends to get muddy with multifunction cards, how many functions exist, etc. And any sorting drastically slows down the disassembly process for my decks. So they're only sorted by color.
Unfortunately, I'm coming to the end of an era: specifically, the era of 2 boxes per color. Blue and green are well past fitting into 2 boxes, and black is borderline. White and red have a little room to go, but not much, and WotC has a bad habit of printing new good cards. Two boxes each works out to roughly 1000 sleeved cards per color, not including multicolor. So I have dilemma - do I buy more boxes, and let my collection keep getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger? Or do I try to find a way to cut down?
The gut-reaction thought I had was "well, I could just cut down to the top 1000 cards of each color, and replace cards instead of adding them." But that gets a bit dicey. For one thing, there are a lot of cards that are strong but niche. Just about every tribal card is only good in its own tribal deck. All the "you may include any #" cards are taking up an increasing amount of space. I need enough regular basics, and snow basics. At a certain point, you're choosing between which archetype gets to be supported, and which don't. Also it gets way more annoying to add cards. It's one thing to pick out the playable cards in a set and acquire them, it's another to sift through my entire collection and compare all of them to the new recruits to remove an equal number.
Continually expanding isn't so bad, although the collection is a bit of a burden when it comes to relocating, something I do relatively often. But I think a bigger problem is that it keeps becoming more and more unwieldy to build decks. Monocolor isn't so bad, but making a 3c or (god-forbid) 5c can get pretty excruciating. Adding more boxes is just going to make things even worse as time goes on.
One middle-of-the-road option I've considered is to pull out the niche cards, the flying men etc, to reduce the main boxes down to a more reasonable count. Unsleeved cards take up less space, and since I'd be using them less often, I could take some time to sort them into archetype/function without needing to spend a bunch of time re-sorting them every time I disassemble a deck, aside from the handful I might use. However, this has some trickiness too - I'd probably want to have some method of identifying which cards go to which category, to make disassembly easier. With sleeves I could just use a slip of paper or something, but outside of a sticker (which could damage the card) idk how I'd manage for unsleeved cards. Ofc, I could just sleeve them, but then they'd take up a lot more space.
This is a fairly rambling post since I'm kinda just spitballing ideas at this point. Sorry about that. Has anyone else run into similar problems? And if so, how did you solve it?