The FASTEST way to sort and store your Magic the Gathering cards

If I had a nickle for every time I spilled a 3000 count box of cards on the floor, I'd have ten cents. But at least now we can all sort our cards more efficiently!

Music courtesy of Filmstro

[niccoloporretta]

The best way to sort is a pile of green cards and a pile of everything else. All your good cards are sorted!🦕

[eugenecunningham]

As a commander player who only buys around a box a set (boxes and the annual precons). I organize by color, cmc, then alphabetical. Staples and valuables (greater than 1$ or easy to trade) go in binders.

I have about 6000-8000 cards currently so may need to reform as the collection grows.

[redstang]

Just stumbled onto this as I was searching for ways to sort multicolored cards. Cool idea to match up the sorting methods. I learned something new that I kinda knew at heart but wouldn't have been able to explain so eloquently. FYI I am a commander player so I only sort by WUBRG colors, (then artifacts, multicolor, lands, tokens) and I also separate by rarity. I just finally got around to sorting by alphabetical order for basics (if more than four copies of a card I decided to get rid of them to reduce bulk). Uncommons are sorted by CMC since that's what I had done once long ago (again if more than four copies of a card, get rid of it to reduce bulk). Works for me and managed to get rid of a whole fat pack worth of duplicates!

[handfulloftrash]

Turns out the way that everyone sorts cards is significantly faster than all these other stupid ways I present at the beginning of my video

[leverposteifantomet]

I don't quite understand why so many seem to feel the need to sort by sets. I understand it if you want to collect an entire set or something, but if you want to be able to find the card you are looking for easily, it seems sub-optimal to me. If you're trying to find a specific card that has multiple printings, and you're unsure which printing you have (which is often the case for me), you'll often end up wasting a ton of time going through the wrong box. I sort only by color and alphabetical. So if I for example need a copy of lightning bolt for a deck, I'll just go to my red Ls, and all my spare lightning bolts will be there.

[screwthenet]

I always found it so strang theat people used "U" for Blue cards, to differentiate from the "B" for the black mana cards. Just use "A" for "AZUL" which means blue. There may be a word for blue in some random language that begins with the letter "U", but off the top of my head I cannot think of one.

[pennykukovec]

This was so much fun to watch...I'm heading on to next video!

[ASoberBear]

Color
Than
Mana Cost

—

Rares and mythic (combine) same format but in separate containers.

I find this to be useful because if you crack open a box… enjoy alphabetizing and pulling apart thousands of cards. A 3 cost blue will go in same area always and only have to dig through a small chunk to find it.

[AIMLESS-NAMELESS]

I think quick sort is really interesting idea. I bet you could adapt it to work for Mtg better. Especially if you have more them 1 person helping you sort. For example if you sort by cmc, person 1 takes out all cards that are 3 cmc (there is definitely a better number to start with and I think this matters a lot for efficiency and making sure there is no down time) ok so middle person take out all 3 cmc cards and passes the ones above 3 to the right and below to the left, then left does a bucket sort and makes 2 piles of 1 and 2 cmc while the person on the right makes 2 piles of 4 and 5. This leaves you with a remainder but the higher you go up in cmc the less cards you have to sort. I think this works with color but isn’t really worth doing because of how easy it is to sort by color. It could be helpful sorting multicolor cards, the middle person taking cards that contain blue and the right person takes green and the left takes red ect. Super thought provoking vid, I got 25, 000 cards to sort

[spinaldart]

For EDH deck building, this is my process of bucket sorting:

Color
Creature/noncreature
Alphabetical
Remove duplicates unless they are a different frame or artwork

[justinkarnes]

The real reason why Bucket Sort is so fast is because it isn't a comparison sort and is therefore unbounded by the lower-bound of all comparison sorting algorithms.

[Dvalb]

Why dont go alphabetically in groups? E.g. ABC, DEF, etc. Then afterwards sort more detailed alphabetically, eg. A, B, etc. And finally: Aa, Ab, Ac etc?
Alphabetically is useful because you can always subdevide "as needed", for instance never subdevide XYZ :p

I mainly collect green pauper cards, so I (scanned and) sorted into these useful categories: Green pauper legal; everything else.:D

[Marwenstrom]

I sort by artist, centering and condition 😂

[phoenix-walker]

Interesting. I bucket sort as well. But mine is designed for commander as that is the only format I play these days.

My algorithm is:
color identity
card type
cmc

So long as I know the cmc, this makes lookups really easy. Lightning bolt is in the 1 cmc red section.

It'd be even more effective if I sorted alphabetically after cmc, but I find that with this segmentation strategy, alphabetical is not worth the time.

[arongoldstein]

bro you lost me when you sorted by color using artifacts..

[lamalditaverdad]

Maybe this is a dumb question (new to MTG) but, what if a card has two colors?

[mikekukovec]

I think your first "insertion sort" example made sense for humans *and for only five cards) but if it were a computer doing it, you missed some steps (which is why it's so slow for the computer using this method). When your order was 1, 4, 5, 2, 3...you directly moved the 2 before the 4. A computer would have first moved the 2 before the 5...then started at the beginning again, then move the 2 before the 4. Likewise, the last step (starting 1, 2, 4, 5, 3) would have iterated 1, 2, 4, 3, 5; 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. It's those extra steps, starting from the beginning (and going all the way through what has already been sorted) each time ... that slows the process down. The divider example was great. It would be interesting to see if more "buckets" and/or the order of buckets increased the speed.