I am not a collector by nature; it’s a tendency I think of as almost aspirational. Imagine staying in one spot long enough to settle in and to begin curating a selection of knickknacks, things, and treasures. To develop an aesthetic and home that reflect you, instead of a hastily ordered mass of Ikea furniture that serves as ‘good enough.’ This serviceable, but emotionally cold method of decoration suits the purpose until you need to pick up stakes and move again. Imagine settling in place.

Growing up, my family moved from home to home. It wasn’t, thankfully, due to economic pressures; rather my dad blamed my mum’s itchy feet for our habit of changing addresses every calendar year. We lived in thirteen homes before I left for university at seventeen, eager to see the world and accustomed to a half-packed bag keeping me mobile. I inherited the trait, rarely staying more than a year or two in any given house since.

I wasn’t without my favourite things, I was fortunate enough to have my raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, but I felt disconnected from the urge to collect, which as a kid in the latre-90s and early aughts is all I was expected to do. Especially odd given my hobbies. From guitars to videogames, music, movies, and magic, collecting is celebrated, venerated and enthusiasts treat it as a requirement of the hobby. An oft repeated adage for readers is that book buying, and book reading are two distinct hobbies, yet I probably own a couple dozen books to my name. For an avid reader, I barely have enough of a library to take up a shelf — and my Magic collection has grown to roughly the same size.

The accumulation of cards is far from intentional. Like other players in my orbit, when I returned to the gamer in 2022, I feverishly grabbed sealed product from the shelves whenever I swung by my LGS. A new set release brought new legendaries and the endorphin lurch of possibilities on what I could brew next. I justified this early splurge under the principles of proper storage. If there were five colours in Magic — and if you included multicolour, artifacts, and lands — a responsible player surely needed proper boxes to store their cards. If anything, I was being efficient by picking up every bundle offered. Then there were the singles that filled out the skeletons of potential decks that I brewed over a manic ten months.

Limited, of course, leads to a ballooning amount of chaff — forty cards cobbled together into notions of a coherent strategy, as well as the cast-offs tucked away for another time in a prerelease kit. When I lay out the patterns of my early purchases alongside my reinvestment in the game, it makes perfect sense. In some ways, it may even be a bit on the conservative side — or at least that’s how I justify every Secret Lair skipped and collector booster left to spike in price at a later date.

Magic, after all, is a game of resource accumulation.

I can’t shake the feeling, though, that calling my stacked boxes gathering dust on the shelf does a disservice to those who put themselves into the methodically organized binders and rows of card stock. Their rare finds and beloved printing have been curated potentially over decades. I’m a player whose boxes lack an organizational principle beyond that, hopefully, they’re all right side up. My hoard has grown through apathy. An amassing of cards as consequence for player a game I love rather than a passion in and of itself.

The recent announcement that Sony will be ending production of their games on disks after January 2028, thereby locking players into a single storefront and a debatable concept of ownership has brought me back to reappraise my collection. If the option to simply rent my cards at a fraction of the cost — a naïve pricing structure, I am aware — would I miss the collecting aspect of the game? I doubt it. Yet, I never play with proxies, for no reason other than I prefer the limitations imposed by cards in my collection or readily accessible at my LGS without breaking the bank.

Rarely do I return to a book, movie, game, or other piece of art if I felt like I got something out of it the first time around. There is too much to experience in the world that a shift to temporary libraries would barely affect me, but it would be a shame if it were to happen.

I still have my favourite books and films; that I revisit at different junctures of my life to see how my feelings have shifted. Or, more importantly, if I can pin down whether it was me or the work that elicited that change. How you collect and is deemed worthy of collecting, offers insight into a person. This is from the most discerning collector to the type who picks up every purchase coming down the pipeline — the ideal WOTC customer. If I was to be a collector, I wanted my collection to mean something, a portrait of myself as a player drawn from the mosaic of cards that I decided were worth holding onto.

That’s another way to put that I finally committee to the plodding process of honing the cards I own into a collection. There must be something in the water, because in combing through articles on the art of Magic collections, there’s several recent wonderful works published by Cascade Cascade on the practice. My hope is to trim down to a single bundle box, a land station and four decks from the unruly pile leering from my desk as I type. When you factor in the commander decks gradually creeping into the double digits, and the handful of sixty-cards kept around and out of fashion, it’s a drastic change. But I would rather sell off the valuable, but emotionally hollow cards to either reinvest in the remaining decks or another are of my life entirely.

Magic, for me, has extended beyond the cards, into the sprawling archive of lore I’ve been delving into during my summer off and, most importantly, the friendships grown from late nights spent playing cards. Somewhere in the deluge of upcoming sets, novel foiling, and blink-and-you-miss-it Secret Lair Drops, I got caught up in the hype and clarion call to buy more. A couple of decks, cobbled together with cards that mean more than the stat lines and meta play, should be enough. Collections are meant for the collector, not some amorphous force of discourse waiting to see pictures posted online. If that amounts to a night’s worth of decks and a single binder, then that is the sort of collector I am.