I returned to playing and collecting Magic: The Gathering in 2021. During Christmas 2020, my best friend re-introduced me to playing MTG. So I purchased an M21 Core Set box and learned how to draft with 2 people (pandemic was a wild time). Shortly after, I purchased my first EDH deck and started playing.
Since then I’ve been going to pre-releases consistently, continuing to expand my EDH collection, and drafting a box every now and then. Over the period of 5 years I amassed a decent collection. My EDH deck collection quickly exploded to 20-ish ready to play decks. Surely I own more cards than I’ll ever get the chance to play with. I am serious, and don’t call me Shirley!
How I Engage With the Hobby#
Being the spreadsheet kind of person I am, I started logging the games I played to understand which decks I played most and to track what I should play or build next. I often found myself wondering which deck to take with me before heading to my Friday night at the local store. I’d use the spreadsheet to make such HARD decisions. Quickly I realized that my favorite decks (often the ones I lost the most with) would be played the most, while the others would just be left there, collecting dust. I also realized that I spent more time organizing and cataloguing cards and building decks than playing them.
To make things more interesting, I decided to play Pauper and create a battlebox with, well, basically the whole format. There were ~30 decks, each sleeved up and ready to be played. An awesome project that took me years to complete.
Building decks is fun. Getting the list of cards, ordering or trading for them, and waiting for them to get home (then cataloguing them so everything is tidy and organized!). I like pulling cards from binders or boxes and sleeving them. I also enjoy flipping through the binder pages and staring at my most precious cards (mostly my cheap promos from participating in events, or my signed cards). I prefer tinkering with them rather than playing and that is totally fine.
Introducing the Pile of Shame#
So what is the problem? Well, having decks ready to go is great, but it does come at a cost, several of them, actually. First is the most obvious: the monetary cost. Sleeves, deck boxes, and all the duplicate cards spread across decks. That can ramp up really quickly.
Then there’s the sheer amount of space this takes. I enjoyed staring at the collection with a certain sense of completion, but that battlebox takes way too damn much space!
And lastly, the mental cost: what am I playing today? So many possibilities to choose from. Maybe I should take this one, not this one… let me check my notes, oh… I’ve played this one only once this year… Maybe I should, but… I really don’t feel like playing it. Alright, let me check the spreadsheet that conveniently has my backlog, and since we’re at it, the price of my collection (ADHD kicking in hard by then). Yikes! I have way too much money in cardboard that’s basically collecting dust and giving me anxiety! What if my apartment gets flooded? This is supposed to be a hobby! Guilt and despair, shame on you! Is all this necessary?
Changes Coming Up#
Alright, so now I’ve determined that there’s a big cost to keeping my collection like that. I have accrued more cards than I will ever play with. I have built more decks than I play with, and I’m not a better player because of it (harsh truth). Reason being, I’ve spent more time sorting and crafting decks than playing with them.
Well… not everything is doom and gloom. This is the way I’ve engaged with this hobby, and it brought me joy while I was doing it. No regrets there! The thing is, circumstances have changed, my priorities have changed, and so will the way I engage with the hobby from now on.
OK, so what now?#
Keeping the reluctant minimalist’s manifesto in mind, my objective is to have a smaller, yet functional, collection with fewer finished decks that I play more and pilot well. The goal is to eliminate the decision making burden and reduce the size of my collection. This way, I wouldn’t feel bad every time I look at the soon-to-be-smaller pile of shame, because all my decks would get some play.
Kristen Gregory has an article where she writes about the perfect number of decks. What is my number? I have no fucking clue. I should put in the chopping block those decks that I’ve played the least this year. But perhaps a better place to start is determining the amount I can pilot without the overhead of trying to remember how the deck works. MTG Specs and Deck Driver each have a good video talking about this.
Although challenging, downsizing my collection will make me feel like I’m doing something good for myself, and I’ll be helping others play the game when I trade (MTG is a trading card game after all!), sell, or donate cards. So that’s a win-win chicken for dinner (or something like that) situation.