Pretty basic question: What are you all finding to be the best way to store/organize your cards? When I started searching online, I figured there would be a plethora of great ways to organize AH cards. But I have yet to find the perfect storage case/box/whatever.
I'd be interested to hear what's working best for you veteran players. I'm sure there's more than one "best way" to go about this.
I'm tempted to go binders for player cards now - I know others have done it, I thought it was overkill - but player cards aren't shrinking anytime soon {Double or Nothing notwithstanding)...
One small binder with inserts for each class and one for Neutral, then use the Return To... boxes to store the campaigns.
I just use BCW long boxes. They're not nearly as pretty as some solutions, but they're cheap and expandable (which is where most of the shiny solutions break down).
I keep player cards in a few, and each campaign prebuilt in its own box so I can grab and go for whatever we're currently playing.
51 minutes ago, Krysmopompas said:I'm tempted to go binders for player cards now - I know others have done it, I thought it was overkill - but player cards aren't shrinking anytime soon {Double or Nothing notwithstanding)...
One small binder with inserts for each class and one for Neutral, then use the Return To... boxes to store the campaigns.
Exactly this, I keep my encounters sleeved in Return to boxes and my player cards unsleeved in binders. I do keep my weakness cards sleeved with the "Return to The Night of the Zealot" for easy selection
Keeping campaign scenario cards in their respective expansion box seems like a fine idea. It's managing the ever-growing player cards that seems to be a challenge.
I've been checking out this option from Tesseract Games, their Infinity Box plus dividers that are sold separately:
Woah, except I just read that Infinity Box requires assembly. For that quite spendy cost, I don't want to have to build the darned thing!
It sure seems like there should be better options that are easier to find out there. I'm honestly surprised this is so tough.
Definitely not as pretty, but it's also less than $5
https://www.bcwsupplies.com/super-shoe-storage-box-3000-cards
Edited by Joshuarleonard16 hours ago, Buhallin said:
17 hours ago, Krysmopompas said:I'm tempted to go binders for player cards now - I know others have done it, I thought it was overkill - but player cards aren't shrinking anytime soon {Double or Nothing notwithstanding)...
We did this and it's been AH-mazing. I honestly can't suggest it enough.
We got a 5" binder and with these card sheets: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07F7PDTP4/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1
We keep all investigator and players cards in there with tabs by investigator, class, asset, event, skill. We have a separate binder that we keep our guides in. Campaigns and Adventures stay in their individual boxes.
Here's what looks to be a very reasonable option that uses an insert for the Core Set box bottom:
I'm just not so confident the Core Set box will hold up over time. Still, this seems like a great starter option.
I've moved to the Return To boxes for all my encounter cards using their dividers. For player cards I actually just redid my binders to put all the classes into their own colored binders because the one binder I was using for player cards was falling apart. I like player cards in binders. Feels more organized to me. I use deck building apps to deck craft so I don't need to rifle through cards all that much. I just need to easily look them up and the binders work well for that. For the campaign inserts I put them in full page sleeves in a binder as well so they don't get lost or torn. It's kinda nice storing them that way since it's kinda like flipping through a book when they are all together like that.
I know there are plenty of people who pursue a single storage solution for all the cards, but man that box will be so big and heavy at this point. Prior to the Return To boxes I was just using cheapo BCW card boxes to store the encounter cards.
Edited by phillosI use the Broken Token core box divider for my player cards, tokens, and investigator cards https://thebrokentoken.com/compact-card-game-organizer
and the Go7 diver for the Return to boxes to store the campaigns https://go7gaming.com/product/ahl-001-for-arkham-horror-zealot/
Neither of these actually need to be glued together.
I also have Go7's core box divider for my second core, but the token box on that one does need to be glued. Other than that, I like it more than the Broken Token - just feels a little better quality, and the slots are more customizable. But the BT is still really good. https://go7gaming.com/product/lgc-003-v2-insert/
I was on the fence about the Return To... organizer until I got one, then I immediately bought 3 more for the other Return To boxes. The section dividers are just too useful in keeping things separate and organized, even with the special organizer cards that come with the Return To boxes. Especially if you put more than one campaign in a single Return To box.
We have the whole collection and have tried a few different storage options as our collection has expanded. Our second core set box holds all of the Expansion scenario guide/booklet and the Rules Reference. The Return To boxes store their campaigns. The 500 ct. BCW boxes will hold a whole campaign (sans player cards) and encounter sets including the 6 Mythos pack instructions. (Dream Eaters is pictured) The Return to Night of the Zealot box holds NotZ and another full campaign with the 6 Mythos instructions. (Pictured with TFA)
We had TFA stored there until it’s Return To released and are storing Innsmouth in it now.
Our player card storage kept outgrowing our solutions. We have finally settled on long clear plastic boxes with a hinged lid that are about the same size as a Return To box. One for each class, one for neautral cards and investigators, and one for Standalones. We bought cheap deck boxes to store the pre-built investigators and their decks, so we can keep them prebuilt for friends (or us), but also have them with the player cards for access if we want to use them in other decks. They also double as a way to hold up the player cards, since the boxes are still kind of too big (for now)!
Thanks to all for sharing how you go about card storage. It's great to see such a variety of clever solutions!
On 10/23/2020 at 4:14 PM, Sarre said:I use the Broken Token core box divider for my player cards, tokens, and investigator cards https://thebrokentoken.com/compact-card-game-organizer
and the Go7 diver for the Return to boxes to store the campaigns https://go7gaming.com/product/ahl-001-for-arkham-horror-zealot/
Neither of these actually need to be glued together.
I also have Go7's core box divider for my second core, but the token box on that one does need to be glued. Other than that, I like it more than the Broken Token - just feels a little better quality, and the slots are more customizable. But the BT is still really good. https://go7gaming.com/product/lgc-003-v2-insert/
I was on the fence about the Return To... organizer until I got one, then I immediately bought 3 more for the other Return To boxes. The section dividers are just too useful in keeping things separate and organized, even with the special organizer cards that come with the Return To boxes. Especially if you put more than one campaign in a single Return To box.
Yeah I can get two campaigns in each box and I have all the standalones in the RttNotZ box. As of the Return to TFA's release I can get all the encounter cards in these boxes quite comfortably as well as a couple prebuilt decks and the deck of weaknesses.
How granular is your sorting, for the people using binders. Just Class asset event skill? Sorting by experience costs? Do you keep cycles sperate or work them all in to some larger sorting scheme?
A fair question. One where I'm sure you'll get very different answers. Considering the card pool updates so often I have a looser sorting scheme than most I think. I sort them by class and then by type (asset, event, skill). Lastly by XP cost. That's pretty much it and I think that's the most useful sort at the coarsest level. Then at least I know if I'm looking for a level 0 Guardian event I can find it within a page or two of the binder. In my experience that's more useful that storing by cycle or by card number since I won't think of either as readily as class/type/xp cost.
If I feel ambitious at some point in the future and/or the game stops updating I might go through and sort within those sections by cost. For assets it would be nice to group them by slot. I don't do either of those things right now, and I doubt I will. Especially sort by cost since that could potentially cause me to do a tremendous amount shuffling around each release. That's more an end of product line type sort.
Edited by phillosI just box them, and sort by class/type/alphabetical. Not to poo-poo phillos' potential ideas, but I'm not sure why you would sort them by cost or even slot. It just seems like it would make them harder to find - you'd have to remember the cost of every given card you're looking up, or which slot it takes, and where would Flamethrower or Enchanted Blade go?
Simpler is better, IMHO
Even sorting by type I feel is a little unnecessary, I do it mostly because that's how ArkhamDB splits them up. It helps that the different card frames actually make it possible to see the category splits even without dividers. For any given organization, the more fine-grained your categories are the harder it's going to be to find any given card.
But honestly, whatever works for you - if you've got the cost of every card in the game memorized and that makes sense to you as a sorting system, power to you
Well I don't do it so clearly I didn't find the value in doing it as well... though the organizing by cost was more about thinking about cost curves and comparing co-located cards. It's not about the ease of looking up a 2 resource asset because I have all the resource costs memorized, which is less about card look up so less valuable at this stage. In any event I wouldn't consider doing that until the game stopped updating. That would be a nightmare to maintain since you'd need to reorder cards alot as new ones come in when using binders. Buhallin sorting alphabetically would also have that sort of overhead if they used binders instead of card boxes. Even in card boxes you gotta resort them. I just throw them in my bucket of class by types by xp.
Edited by phillosOn 10/23/2020 at 11:26 AM, phillos said:I've moved to the Return To boxes for all my encounter cards using their dividers.
i'm doing this, though some of the base encounter cards keep traveling box to box as i am playing through the scenarios. i feel like at the end of all of this, i'll end up reorganizing the whole thing. Return to the Night of the Zealot is practically empty, so i'm guessing i will also store my standalones in that box.
the one thing that is driving me crazy is that the scenario set-ups just show you the symbols. only two cycles in, i now i have so many encounter set dividers that i have to flip through everything to match things up. sure, the symbols have names, but those appear nowhere in the instructions or on the cards, so alphabetizing the storage box is almost pointless until you memorize what they are. also, sometimes you're told to go fish out of previous scenario story cards (not strictly encounter card sets). at this point i've only got a handful of encounter sets memorized: Locked Doors, Ancient Evils, Rats, and Agents of (Unspeakable Name), etc., but that's four out of what, 40? XD
Forgotten Age has more than seven new encounter decks just in the core box. this is about to get even more interesting!
that said, i do really like the Return to boxes for this purpose. hope they put out ones for Circle Undone and Dream Eaters soon enough or else I'm going to run out of space!
Edited by happy_ythogthaWell you probably don't want to follow my lead because I'm a loony, but I buy up cheap core set encounter cards from people. I right now have a set of core set cards for each return to box. There's a nice convenience to that since I pretty much only need to pull out one small box when playing, but there is an expense to that even if you are hunting for cheap deals. Locally for me there were plenty of people early on in the game's life that are more than willing to get rid of their redundant core set cards.
Alternately what I would do if I didn't have that benefit is I would just leave the core set cards in the RtNotZ and just pull out the two boxes whenever playing. That just means RtNotZ is gonna get more wear on it since it's getting opened all the time.
Edited by phillos1 minute ago, phillos said:Well you probably don't want to follow my lead because I'm a loony, but I buy up cheap core set encounter cards from people. I right now have a set of core set cards for each return to box. There's a nice convenience to that since I pretty much only need to pull out one box, but there is an expense to that.
ha! i play solo, so i only ever bought one core. now i have so many investigator cards , they're stacked up like crazy on my desk.
if anyone is looking for an extra something in particular, if i have an extra and it's not in one of my decks or something i'd likely play, i'll probably be happy to share it! : D
10 hours ago, phillos said:Buhallin sorting alphabetically would also have that sort of overhead if they used binders instead of card boxes. Even in card boxes you gotta resort them. I just throw them in my bucket of class by types by xp.
That's a big part of why I don't use binders
For reviewing or comparing cards ArkhamDB does it far better than anything I could do with a binder, so my storage is just about storage.
Alphabetical in boxes isn't bad at all - it's just an insertion sort for new cards. Nothing really gets resorted, you just put the new cards in the right place.
I have the player cards in the RttNoZ box and the encounter cards in the other Return To boxes, but over the weekend I outgrew that setup, so I need to move the player cards. I really don't want to do binders.
I've been considering making my own boxes for player cards to match the Return To ones but that seems crazy, so I'm trying to talk myself into a less perfectionist solution. I'll be checking out all the links everyone posted here for ideas! I don't really want to undertake a box-building and -wrapping project (and, most time consuming, designing the wrap) so Broken Token would be appealing if it will fit the Return To-style dividers, but I suspect they're too tall. (And I'm very attached to the Invocation 2018 player card dividers I snagged on ebay, so that limits my player card storage options.)
On 10/26/2020 at 6:30 AM, phillos said:Well you probably don't want to follow my lead because I'm a loony, but I buy up cheap core set encounter cards from people. I right now have a set of core set cards for each return to box. There's a nice convenience to that since I pretty much only need to pull out one small box when playing, but there is an expense to that even if you are hunting for cheap deals. Locally for me there were plenty of people early on in the game's life that are more than willing to get rid of their redundant core set cards.
Alternately what I would do if I didn't have that benefit is I would just leave the core set cards in the RtNotZ and just pull out the two boxes whenever playing. That just means RtNotZ is gonna get more wear on it since it's getting opened all the time.
hey out of curiosity where do you go for those core box encounter set resellers? I'm considering this but would like to check out prices.
Locally or at conventions when the game first started there were alot of people looking to offset the price of a second core set for player cards. To find that online I think is a bit rare unless you work out a trade somewhere like here. That said I have found listings for super cheap core sets ( around $20-25) over the years on various places like Craigslist, ebay or even Amazon. That's been rarer lately I think because the demand for the game has only increased. Though early alot of people tried that game and didn't dig it due to the complexity and/or random elements. So you saw more people willing to part with product.
Even before the Return to boxes I was making prebuilt core set scenario decks (all ready to go out of the box) for convenience and then holding onto another set for including in campaigns. To do that I think I needed around 3 or 4 core sets worth of cards minimum. Then when the Return To boxes came out I gave up on the prebuilt idea and just started sticking encounter sets in those boxes.