Winter Got You Down? Sort Your Cards!

By Matt Gilman of Cards Over Coffee

If you see this picture and think, ugh, this means you have the winter blues. Most of us get the winter blues. I know I do. However, I am here to tell you that there is a way to beat the winter blues and keep yourself busy in the hobby during the long months of winter. This is what I do to keep myself distracted from the white stuff and more focused on the card stuff.

Around the beginning of November, I quit sorting and try to get as many mail days as I can. I will make a lot of trades, some purchases and open up a few packs then load it all onto my desk. Some of the mail days around Christmas time I even keep sealed until Christmas then open those ones and add to my desk. So what does this do? Well, it gives you some serious cards to sort and I usually start doing so right after Christmas when I feel winter really starts to kick into full gear.

It begins with a smaller card sorting tray where I sort the cards by sport, parallel, insert, base cards, hits, teams I collect, players I collect, and sets I am chasing.
Since there are usually more cards than what these trays hold, I then transfer the cards pile by pile to deeper sorting trays that I have sitting on the floor of my card room.

From there, I empty out the smaller tray into the deeper ones and begin this process all over until I run out of cards. Each pile I created in the deep trays goes into their section in my collection.

Some of the cards go into these boxes that I need to make more creative labels for sometime.

The rest fill binders, following the Binder Numbering System I wrote about in my last article.
The process overall takes a long time to sort, put away and sometimes get distracted with a new project or updated sorting idea along the way. I have had many of those times.
So a good part of your winter will be spent sorting and hence curing those winter blues.