How I Organize My Cards

For a while, I never knew the way of organizing cards that worked best for me. I wanted to find a way more efficient and less costly than binders and sheets, so I began to do some research on what would work. And after working on it for many weeks, I found that the 5200 count boxes would be the best for me. This meant, transferring thousands of player collections to these boxes which would take time, but I was willing to be patient. And now that I know it works for me, I've decided to share it on my blog for anyone out there looking for a way to store their cards.

Here's how it works, I organize the rows of the boxes by player last name. Now for a team like the Cubs which my 2nd-most collected team, I keep all the Cubs together. The cards are then sorted by year and finally by brand. So, for a player like Ernie Banks, there are cards from 1956-2017 organized in order. It takes a lot of work, but it is beneficial in the long run, especially when I acquire new cards.

But, I don't just want every card in only a penny sleeve, so I have a rule.

True vintage cards from about 1975 and older get a penny sleeve and a top loader. These cards are more valuable, so they need to be preserved. Also getting a top loader is any somewhat valuable rookie card of one of the players I collect. All the rest of the cards are in just penny sleeves which should certainly be enough for commons.

Another rule is for numbered cards. Any numbered card, no matter how high or low the print run...

gets a penny sleeve and top loader as well. These few basic rules ensure that the most valuable cards in my player collections will stay in good shape and out of harm's way. 

But, all this transferring of cards means I'm way behind on putting cards away as you can see from the picture above. I have stack after stack of player collection cards to put away, which I intend to shrink down during my holiday vacation in a couple of weeks. Until then, I still have 5 stacks of cards to repeatedly look at.