Inventorying a Collection

Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer card art

In my last post, I talked about the DragonShield MTG Manager to inventory my collection of Magic cards. After a month of scanning, I am done my recording my collection. For the first time, I have a complete knowledge of the number of cards I have and their value. Exciting! Here are some statistics from both my inventory and the scanning process.

The Goals

- to know what I own (which will help both construct decks and avoid duplicate purchases)

- to identify high-value cards that may warrant selling

- to produce a reference to facilitate trades

The Scanning Process

Time: 43 hours (done over 31 days: 9 July - 8 August 2022)

Cards scanned: everything except tokens and basic lands (special basic lands were scanned in a few cases, when the value was known to be over a few dollars)

Scans performed: 17,831*

Scans per minute: 6.9 cards per minute on average 

- maximum noted speed: 17 cards per minute

The Inventory

Total cards: 31,563

Total unique cards: 11,155

- Unique cards I own only one copy of: 4,249

- Unique cards I own at least a playset (4 copies) of: 3,627

- Most owned non-basic-land card: Evolving Wilds: 68 copies

Total unique Magic cards in print (as of today, excluding funny cards): 23,318

Percent of unique Magic cards owned: 47.8%

Percent of unique Magic card playsets owned: 15.2%

Final Thoughts

I wanted to include financial information on here (the estimated value of my collection based on market prices), but I'm both too embarrassed and unwilling to advertise the total number.  I will share this:

- Unique cards with $20 value or more: 48

- Unique cards with $50 value or more: 3

- Most expensive card owned: Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer

Inventorying my collection was time-consuming but worthwhile, if humbling.

*This number differs from the total cards in my collection for three reasons:

1) If I was scanning sets of organized cards, I would scan a given card and update the quantity rather than scan the same version of a card multiple times.

2) If, in those organized cards, a given card had different versions- foil, extended art, etc.- each version would get a scan (and then quantities updated as needed).

3) I scanned my collection based on how I store them- sometimes by set, sometimes in decks. Thus, if I had multiple copies of a given card, but (say) 2 copies were in one set, 1 copy was in another set, and 1 copy was in a deck, that would mean I scanned that card 3 times.

4) For decks, sometimes I organized the cards first (so I could scan the first copy and update the quantity, per 1) above) or sometimes I scanned them individually. So there isn't a consistent predictor of how many times I scanned a card. 

None of this really matters, but I wanted to explain the discrepancy.