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I had the day blocked off as “sort Magic cards”.  Normally, I’d start with some studying but I guessed that it’d take about 14 hours to sort all my cards and was willing to trade some study time for the finality of having everything in its place by the end of the day.  I started at about 4 AM with a grand basic sort that involves the following piles in order of deference:

  1. Foil/Promo/Misprint
  2. From a deck or known needed card (would go into my personal collection binders
  3. From Legends (I realized I have enough random Legends cards that I could assemble  a set)
  4. Silver Border Card
  5. Other Special
  6. Rare
  7. Common/Uncommon

These piles then get broken down by color and set and in the case of rares are sieved into bulk piles if I have more than 5 of a “bad” rare or sieved into bulk piles if it’s an uncommon that I have more than 4, 8, or 12 of, depending on how usable I think the card is.  At around 5 I’d been sorting for 10 hours once you account for my lunch break and I started to see things.  I’d see a foil flash by to not find it on a recheck or see some valuable card in the wrong pile, the hardest part was doing foreign cards as these were identified most viscerally and most prone to error.  At one point I thought a card in some Asian language that I somehow “knew” meant “PENISTOWN”.  I indulged myself and went back to find this:

Good news: My eyes weren’t playing tricks on me.  Bad news:  I have what I think is a Japanese Ghost Town with the word “Penis Town” written across it.

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Staff members are drawn to the Magic Tournament as the locus of nerd-life at camp and they’re usually quite willing to help me with the fantastically menial tasks that dominate preparing my collection for sale.  One particular staff member sprang to the opportunity to work with cards and I gave him the following directions:  Create piles containing 12 unique cards of each color, 10 unique artifacts and 15 multicolor cards.  Keep going until you run out of cards (he had a 5000 count box, which would take me almost a day to process).

I returned about 10 minutes later and he had make 12 piles each containing one card of each color, an artifact, and a multicolor card.  He made 10 of these piles and when I asked him what he did he responded “I did exactly what you said”.