Why Organize?

One of the most important, and overlooked principles of collecting is organization. What use is having that twenty dollar mythic rare, if you can't find it in your jumbled shoe box. Taking the time to thoroughly organize your collection is beneficial to you the collector, for multiple reasons.

Quality

By keeping your collection nice and tidy, you well avoid most hazardous events, that can severely depreciate the value of your collection. Every veteran collector has a horror story, involving a valuable stack of cards, and a spilled beverage, or some similar irreversible event. But if that stack of cards were in its rightful place, the table would have been all that had gotten wet. Valuable cards should be kept in a cardboard box, stored away from moisture. But a regular shoe box is not good enough, as your cards will shift and bend as they are transported. I would strongly suggest a regular white card box, which can be found at most any retailer. Do not be duped into storing your cards in a metal container, as the lack of pliability of such containers will bend cards which fall into crevices. Furthermore, when storing cards in the above mentioned white boxes, be sure to use spacers of some sort (before the packaging on pre-constructed decks was changed, the pre-con boxes worked great), so that rows will not shift and fall over. Not only will you develop more respect for the value of your collection, but others who look through your collection will have more respect for it as well.

Efficiency

Finding the cards you want to play or trade, from your available card pool, becomes a time consuming task, without organization. If you are anything like me, you have numerous deck ideas circulating in your mind at once. The impulsive thing to do, is to pull out all the cards that could go into the deck, and see what you have. However, doing this, with numerous deck ideas, will turn your collection into multiple half-finished decks. Before long, you will either not know what you have, or not know what half finished deck that key card for your next half finished deck is. One of the most important keys in maintaining organization and efficiency is: DON'T BUILD HALF FINISHED DECKS. If a key rare is the center piece of two separate deck ideas, either combine the two deck ideas into one deck, or (and this is probably the more realistic and balanced solution), choose the better of the two deck ideas, and build that deck. If you have a deck near completion, but are lacking a few key cards in your collection, use proxies, sleeve it and leave it. Keeping your finished decks separate from your unused cards, which will comprise the majority of your collection, will reduce clutter when building your next deck.

For new players with relatively few cards to organize, the task of organizing is not as daunting as it is for players with 5,000 plus cards in their collection. But if you start when you are new, the task becomes less tedious, and more habitual. Take it from me, a player with a collection of 60k plus cards. I started organizing three years ago (of coarse organizing when time would allow), and my collection is just now nearing completion. Maintaining organization is a never-ending task, but the time you spend putting your cards in their rightful place, straight out of the pack, is far more efficient, than the time you will eventually spend, finding cards to play and trade.

Presentation

If and when you start trading, you will eventually run across that collector, whose collection completely lacks organization. This collector, let's call him Bob, might pull out a half crushed shoe-box, or a ratty binder with nonfunctional prongs, and plastic pages falling out. It is very frustrating to trade with Bob, because it takes forever to manually look at the mess that is Bob's collection. You open Bob's crushed box, and find a few rares, sparsely mixed into damaged, bent and sticky commons and uncommons. This will lead you to doubt the quality and value, of what few rares you may find of interest in Bob's collection. Even if you trade with Bob, it will surely not be you who gets the short end of the deal. But just as you come across what you have been looking for, in comes Rich (the anal-retentive, albeit extremely organized collector). You drop what you previously had in hand, and immediately approach Rich with a laundry list of cards for hopeful deck ideas. With unnerving quickness, Rich is able to pop the lid to his collection, thumb through some rows, and pull out exactly what you are looking for.

In the given scenario, it is obvious who is going to be able to pull off the better trades. I will cover presentation and organization of your rare book later on, but for now we can clearly see why Rich is the more successful collector. While Bob is spilling his clumped together mess of a collection across the table, frantically searching for a lack-luster rare, Rich is already moving on to his next trade. Rich may have exactly what Bob has, but because of organization, Rich is able to pull off better trades, more frequently.

Conceptualization

The act of organizing your collection will force you to really look at what you have. You might organize your collection by color, color combination, casting cost, card type, and/or rarity, but in the process, you will inevitably see some of your cards in a different light. You might have passed a card by hundreds of times, before you finally realize that it either functions a little differently than you first realized, or that its function is more important than you realized. The last example of this I can remember was with Shaper Parasite. I came to realize one day, that the printed power/toughness on Shaper Parasite is very intentional. Not only can the creature's morph be used to remove creatures with toughness two or less, but the Shaper Parasite can also sneak through for an extra two damage when unblocked, by targeting itself with its morph ability. Furthermore the Shaper's morph can also be used to reduce the damage done by an unblocked creature, or save a blocking creature from the graveyard. This creature's versatility, in the body of a three drop 2/3, makes it much more playable than I had previously realized. In taking the time to organize, you will come up with synergies, and deck ideas, that you never would have found otherwise. Just remember to write them down, instead of pulling the cards out. You wouldn't want to undo all your hard work by building half finished decks.