The Magic Collection I Finally Admitted I'd Outgrown

I wrote a review of Magic: The Gathering a while back on this site and I said in it that I keep meaning to sell off the closet bin and never do. That was true when I wrote it. It isn’t true anymore, and the story of how I actually got around to it is dumber than I expected going in.

I’d told myself for three years that I’d sort through it eventually, find the actually valuable stuff, box up the rest for a local game shop’s buy list, turn a pile of cardboard I wasn’t using into either cash or at least closet space I could use for something else. Every time I opened the bin to start, I’d get maybe twenty minutes in, get distracted trying to remember what a specific old deck used to do, and close it back up having sorted almost nothing. This happened more times than I want to admit.

What actually broke the cycle was Colby, my brother, needing to borrow a folding table for something and going into my closet to find one, and coming out holding the bin asking what exactly my plan was here, because from where he was standing it looked less like a collection and more like a problem I’d decided to store instead of solve. I was wrong to keep telling myself I’d get to it eventually, and hearing someone else say the obvious thing out loud is apparently what it took.

So I actually did it. Four hours on a Sunday, every card out on the card table, sorted into keep, sell, and genuinely no idea. The keep pile was smaller than I expected, mostly cards from cube nights with Marcus that don’t rotate out of relevance because we’re not playing anything with a rotation. The sell pile filled two shoeboxes and got me about two hundred dollars at the local shop, less than the cards probably cost originally, which stung a little, but less than the closet space was worth to me at this point.

What surprised me is how little I missed any of it once it was gone. I kept waiting for a pang of regret over some specific card I’d let go of, and it never really came. Turns out the collection had stopped being about the cards a while back and had just become a thing I was maintaining out of inertia, and once I actually looked at it directly instead of avoiding the bin, letting go of most of it was easier than three years of avoidance made it seem like it would be.