A forgotten moving box full of cards from 1996 to 2001, including one worth €60: how I sort, value and log old collections and what you should watch out for.
Almost everyone who played or collected Magic in the nineties or early 2000s still has a box somewhere. Mine was a moving box that had sat in my basement since I moved in 2019. Its contents are much older: cards from Alliances (1996), Visions, Mirage, Odyssey, Prophecy, Judgment, Torment and Sixth Edition. Over two video episodes I went through the box card by card. Here is how I approach it and what I learned.
Before you value anything, open the box carefully once and check the condition of the cards: moisture, bent stacks, rubber bands pressed into the cards. Then I sort by set. In Magic, the set symbol sits to the right of the type line. Old sets often have no collector number printed on the card, so a search by card name, picking the right set by its symbol, is the way to go.
One quirk of old sets: some cards exist with several illustrations. In Alliances, for example, some commons have two different artworks under the same number. If you collect precisely, check the art and not just the name.
The prices TCG-Completist shows are trend prices, the average of what a card recently sold for on Cardmarket. Don't fixate on that number. Three things shift the real value of your card a lot:
More on where the numbers come from: Card prices explained.
Most old cards are worth a few cents, and that is normal. But between hundreds of commons there are real finds again and again. From my box:
The lesson: don't give up after the first stack. The value of an old collection almost always sits in a few single cards, and you only find them if you really handle every card once.
In the first episode I still entered every card via search. That works, but for a whole box it takes hours. In the second episode I logged the next 89 cards from four sets using only the card scanner: an old webcam pointed at the table, hold the card in front of it, done. The scanner missed two cards; all others went straight into the collection with set, number and price. One detail I noticed: cards without a sleeve are recognized more reliably, because the sleeve reflects light. How the scanner works is explained in Scan your collection instead of typing.
A bonus of logging digitally: you keep German and English copies cleanly apart. If you own the same card in both languages, switch the card language in TCG-Completist and check it off a second time there. You track duplicates via the quantity and can trade them later.
Anything worth more than a few euros goes into a sleeve immediately. Sleeves differ a lot: cheap “penny sleeves” at around 50 cents per 100 are better than nothing but have a lot of room at the top and bottom, so the card slides around. For valuable cards I use snug sleeves in which the card sits flush. More in Storing cards properly.
