General Forum

Hey guys,

What do you find is the best way to sort your cards? I like to do mine by set, but I have a bunch of higher dollar cards and specials that I want to put in a binder or two. I have baseball football basketball and hockey. Would you sort it by value, sport, player? What do you guys find the best? 

Thanks

I would guess I am an anomaly but I sort all by team, then alphabetically by player, within player chronologically, then within each year alphabetically by brand.

I had thought about team, but that sounds like a bit more work than I want to do. I do have a binder of Eagles cards I picked up at a yard sale and thought it was pretty nice to have a team, but with so many teams I could end up with way too many binders. I already have about 30 or so and am almost out of storage space for them.

"Best" will obviously vary person to person. You just want to try and do whatever makes it quickest for you to find what you're looking for and easily put new additions to your collection away. Or at least that's my goal.

 I sort most of my baseball cards by team. (Almost my entire collection is Baseball - other stuff is mostly stored in a separate shoebox). Each team has its own hinged plastic box. 

If I'm trying to complete a set, those cards are separate. I put them in the right order in binder pages. That way I can just flip to the right spot and slot in new additions when I get them.

I also have a couple player PCs, so those have their own little boxes until I get around to ordering more binder pages for those.

Oh, and I have a separate box that holds my best stuff. The best RCs, cool cards of players I particularly like, a couple non-baseball things, (etc.). Those are all sleeved and inside top loaders.

Since I'm not a set collector, and since I collect only baseball, I organize them in the following hirearchy:

1. San Diego Padres (if they ever played for the Padres, they automatically go in this group).
2. Hall of Famers
3. MVP's
4. CY's
5. ROY's 
6. WS MVP's
7. LCS MVP's
8. Perfect Games / No-No's
9. 300 Saves
10. Mexican born players (honoring my heritage)
11. Other cards I wish to keep

Once categorized, I organize them in alphabetical order by last name, and then chronologically from oldest to newest.

So my Justin Verlander cards are currently cataloged in the MVP's section, with the oldest cards first. Once he's elected to the HOF, I'll move his cards to the HOF box.

I keep track of my cards with the help of Google Sheets and my TCDB collection. It's a lot of work, but I like to go back to my cards frequently and keep them updated.

I have posted this a couple of times in answer to this question. But here is what I do...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZAv5TLn8mQ

However which way you sort them, if you are using this site extensively to track your collection, I would sort them so that they appear in the order they are listed here after you use the Multiple Collections and Filters to narrow down the cards you want to sort.

That would be Year, set alphabetically, card #.  Doing it this way will save you a lot of frustration.

I use the database here for sorting.  I have three collections for my PC here.  Each collection is based on what type of storage device is used.  Big Boxes, Small Boxes and Binders are the three types of storage devices I use.  When I add a card to my collection I use the comment field to record the location of the card.  I have that this method makes it easy for me to track my collection and also locate cards should I need to find one particular card.

Depends on the dollar amount of the cards you are working with.

More expensive cards (not in a complete set) I would opt for top loader cases in box.  If album is a must, a larger page size so card could stay in top loader.

For complete sets, I like to put the stars in middle of page to minimize damage from top or bottom

Mark

These are all great ideas fellas. Thank you so much. I will probably take a little from each of you. I do use this site to put in my collection but it takes quite a while to get it done. I have done about 30k cards so far and most of that was from complete sets that I just add the entire thing at one time. I have about 100,000 cards (give or take) in my collection and it spreads over every sports. AI have only come across a few cards so far that I am unable to find on here. The site is really pretty amazing. I haven't even begun to use all the features yet.