Im getting a ton of cards now and Im trying to figure out the best way to Organize them. Currently I have them in binders by house. Inside each house binder I have them split up into Characters, Attachments, Lands, Events and so on. Inside each of those categories I have them put in sleeves alphabetically. This is nice when you know exactly what your looking for. But since I currently spend more time reading cards and checking them out Its hard to browse to come up with build Ideas.

So my question is a simple one. How do you Organize your cards, and why?

Bigjim22 said:

I have just started playing around on Agotcard deck builder. I cant seem to get the other one to work on cardgamedb. It is way easier doing it online than thumbing through my cards looking for a theme and then tracking down like minded cards.

So while being newer at deck building, having your cards organized by house (and type, and alphabetized etc) is a great help, you'll find yourself completely shifting every card in your collection with every new chapter pack you buy.

Now that I'm more familiar with the cards and use agotcards to build most of my decks, I'm considering re-organizing my collection to either straight up by cycle/card number, or by cycle/card number within houses.

As a fairly broke player, I don't have a super large pool as many other people here. In fact, they all manage to fit in one core set boxes I have. (The other has the rule books, extra titles and power/gold tokens.)

But all the cards are divided by house and type, characters in one a stack (rubber banded), locations, attachments, events in another. I even made a separate stack for neutral characters and neutral locations, attachments and events with dual house at the end of each type. Plots are divided by gold in order of initiative with a separate stack of 2 claims plots and theme plots (River plots for now…).

Eventually, I may have to move into a binder or something as rubber bands keep breaking every now and then… but that's money I don't have.

How:

Okay. I'll admit that in this regard I've gone a bit over the top. My solution is not efficient in space or cost, but the accessibility is pretty good and the aesthetic is fun. I went with binders organized by sets. I used view binders so I could put custom covers & spines on them, and divider pages to quickly find a certain set. I scanned boxes or downloaded images to create custom designs for the covers and divider pages, and I even found what I think is the same font used for the game title so I could create text that was somewhat matched. I used images of the CP covers to identify where a pack begins in the sleeve pages.

I know, it sounds like I am OCD. Trust me, there are plenty of aspects of my life where it can be proven that I am NOT OCD.

Why:

I am a pretty new player. I honestly wanted an easy way to browse through the cards and just look at them and read them. I am also not committed to a single house. Being a noob it was easiest to organize in a strictly numeric fashion. It's fun to put a binder in your lap and start flipping through the pages and trying to absorb and learn, rather than just grabbing the latest championship deck off the net. But if you want to assemble a netdeck, it's pretty easy as long as you know the set a card comes from. I think, like others in this thread, that building a deck from scratch using a particular theme or whatever is best done by one of the online deckbuilders, but once you have that decklist the cards are easy to find in the binders. And, dammit, they look impressive on the shelf!

If you want to have a look at my binders I have some pics at my Smugmug gallery .

impressive indeed.

Wow. Excellent organization with those binders. I mess around with my cards too much to do that; they would all be out too often to make binders useful to me. I keep mine in the medium-sized card boxes, like the ones that were given out at DoIaF when GRRM was there. I have a lot of old long boxes from my MTG days also. My current decks go in deck boxes.

The custom dividers are a very nice touch. I'm too lazy for that, but I still use the same principle: I have 3 binders; one has House cards (3 different looks), titles, the Core Set and the house boxes; the next has A Clash of Arms, A Time of Ravens, King's Landing and Defenders of the North; and the third has Brotherhood without Banners, Secrets of Oldtown, A Tale of Champions and Beyond the Narrow Sea. I expect to start a new binder when the next cycle or house box comes out.

You must have bigger binders than mine, I could only get 3 cycles in one without it being overloaded. As for the dividers, some might say that I just have too much time on my hands…

I use a sheet for 18 distinct cards (front and back). If you use a sheet for 9 cards (front only), that would make your binders bigger.

I keep all of my cards except events in teh core set box. There is enough room in it to separate all the:

• Characters by house (putting neutral and multi-house together)
• Locations
• Attachments
• Plots
• Agendas

I do not separate the locations or attachments by house, just because I didn't feel there was a need to. There were far more character cards that needed sorting than anything else. All other cards with the exception of events aren't numerous enough by house to separate. Events I just stacked them all into ~4 piles and put them into one of the house expansion cases (which are great for holding decks if you are too much of a cheapskate for card carriers or boxes).