A while back, I was picking up some things I needed for legacy. Specifically, I was grabbing a Polluted Delta and some assorted other stuff, which gave me at least one of every fetch, dual, and shock. The Delta was going right into one of my EDH decks, until such a point as I needed it for a legacy list.
The downside to this plan was that I couldn't keep the EDH list assembled in a playable form at the same time as a legacy list with the same cards, or have multiple decks running the same stuff. Different sleeves made it easy to keep track of which cards went where, but difficult to share between them. I had a fair number of terrible proxies that I was using to keep track in those scenarios, but they were ugly and I've never been a big fan of using proxies myself.
The natural course of action, then, was to resleeve everything into the same color and type of sleeves and combine them all into a single box. It's by no means a new idea. Eternal players have had similar systems set up for quite some time, and it's got quite a few similarities to cubes. It also let me track my collection quite a bit better, which is helpful when buying cards or trading.
The sleeves are a bit of a pain. They have to be decent sleeves, because the box needs to last. Replacing all of them every year or two sounds like an awful prospect with that many sleeves. They also need to be close to identical. For casual games, it doesn't really matter. The box having legacy and modern parts meant that I had to take marked cards for tournament games into account. I ended up with orange Dragon Shields, picked up piecemeal over the span of several months. They aren't exactly identical, but I have spares if I need to resleeve a tournament deck before the event and my EDH groups don't mind the slight differences. Everything is currently stored in a pair of white cardboard subdivided boxes, which have let me flip through fairly quickly.
Getting everything into the same sleeves and organized is a task on its own, but actually keeping track of it is even worse. I liked the idea of using Excel to keep things organized. I have a very basic system set up where cards are organized by color, then a creature/noncreature split (which may break into more card types as I get more in there), and then alphabetically. In order to be able to consult on the fly, I saved it all into Google Drive, which has worked very well so far. The entire box has a single file, broken into sheets, and each format has a folder full of decklists. Given about fifteen or twenty minutes, I can recreate any of my existing decks from that list. I keep fewer together at any given time, but have many more options as long as I get some advance notice.
The system has worked very well for me so far. It's easier to build and tweak, and I can pick up a wider variety of cards and/or more expensive single cards, because I'm not tracking down multiples to keep a bunch of decks fully stocked. Shared cards for multiple decks in a single night I write on an index card, which I tuck into my bag before leaving. I'd recommend giving it a shot for anyone with a broad range of decks or format interests.
Link to the Google Doc:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1zqnbg70WiL9Jg8rmm1Pm1CDf2wWv7dTQpy7NTRzxPhU/edit?usp=sharing
- Jul 21, 2014 published the article Posted in: Deckbuilding Box