For people who play CCGs, LCGs, and other games that require you to store lots of cards from which you select some: how do you store your stock of cards for convenience in deck building? If it’s an album, how many of the same card do you put in a single slot? (Portability a plus.)
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I have absolutely NOT solved this and any tips are welcome, because oversized wooden inserts are not it.
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I was hoping someone was going to come in here and blow my mind.
Until that happens, I’ll just add that I’ve tried a few different things and all things are lacking, as far as I’m concerned.
I’ve tapped into a small amount of my The The The Lord the of the the The Rings: The The The Card The Game and, for that, have decided that “deck construction cards”, a.k.a. Player cards, should go in a CCG-style card album (in a 3-ring binder as it’s known in the US). The one I got can hold 3 copies of a card per pocket, which means some of the cards get multiple slots. The campaign cards are stored in plastic bags in the core box and/or larger expansion box. Eventually, I might make a foam core, 3d printed, and/or chipboard organizer for these.
For most other games, I just use the built-in insert; Dominion, Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, etc… Haven’t touched either of those in quite some time, so a little hazy on exactly how it all works.
With Ashes, I bought some peg-less cassette tape cases, but with sleeved cards (sleeved because I sleeve most games I play solo, because bridge shuffling is loud, mostly), some of the Phoenixborn were taking up 3 cases each. I have 4 Phoenixborn cased like this but I doubt I’ll continue.
So, cassette cases are definitely an option with a low-count of groups of cards; I say low-count, because the cassette tape cases without the pegs are way harder to find than the ones with, and they end up being, best as I can find, $1 each. If I could cut that cost in half, I might continue this strategy for Phoenixborn and then, likely, Bullet characters and similar.
I’ve bought all of my Aeon’s End content secondhand and have 3 boxes, 2 each with a Broken Token AE-specific organizer, and one with a Folded Space organizer. Broken Token organizer is nicer, but also very heavy and provides a great deal of lid-lift – added now that Broken Token’s owner may (or may not, I haven’t actually looked into it recently; don’t take my word for it) be someone a person might choose to not support.
The Folded Space insert is nice, but with all FS inserts, they require gentle handling (because the foamcore used is… rubbery somehow?) and occasional re-gluing.
I waffled on the Millennium Blades Collusion campaign, but eventually signed up for the late pledge; and then added in the Sleeves addon because the final box design they decided on was “to accomodate sleeved cards” and it was a bad design; I figured as long as it’s designed for sleeved cards, I might as well get some sleeves, and they may as well be the ones specced for the box and vice versa. Well, the box is awful – at one point I started working on my own modular insert using paper-wrapped chipboard; but it was slow going and eventually I hit a limit of what I was able to do with the tools and workflow I had available (I’ve since gotten some new tools and thought about how I could improve my workflow… but have not yet returned to it).
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Remembering who I’m talking to for a moment, I’ve thought about making a parametric 3d-printing model that opens and closes like a cassette tape case… but the hinge + notch/tab latch mechanisms is a bit beyond my skill set.
Plastic is never my first choice of material (paper and wood are both so much more pleasing to touch), but its hard to argue with the effectiveness of cassette tape cases. Perhaps one of the only polystyrene use-cases that’s mere existence doesn’t irk me considerably.
EDIT: sorry, yes, I realize this is tangential because it doesn’t address the topic, i.e. deck construction
I use different storages for different games
Flesh and Blood - A whole bunch of VaultX binders. 3-6 cards per slot.
Netrunner/Arkham - One of those hardboard box things by those guys who made TCG boxes back in the day
L5R - Bulkbox.
Star Wars Destiny - Smaller Fenrir cardboard box
Ashes - Hardboard insert in the core box.
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For small deck boxes I’ve been buying the moulded ones from Board Game Extras (similar ones are on Amazon at twice the price) - those are the ones I used for my Imperium all-in-one, where they’re about right for all of a civ’s cards (plus counters for the Cultists). I think I was hoping for something easier to locate specific cards in.
I’ve looked at official Ashes inserts but they all seem to do the same basic thing of having columns of cards, and the two columns I can get in the box already will do for that. (There’s a bit of extra bulk because I’ve coin-capsuled all the tokens - but I have to say it does make them really pleasant to play with.)
Thanks for all comments so far. Definitely getting ideas.
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I have two big ever-growing card games and I store them differently.
For Legendary, the Marvel Deckbuilding game, everything is in long boxes in a card house with labeled dividers for individual card sets. This is because for any given game, you pick a few full card sets, shuffle those together, and that’s it.
For Arkham Horror LCG, I keep the scenario cards similarly to Legendary but the player deck cards are in binders. There are labels to indicate which cards have upgrades or are linked to other cards. Other than that, every card type just has a spot in the binder. This is because you are picking individual cards to build a deck and constantly changing out specific cards during a campaign.
We have started getting a little into Lorcana, the new Disney CCG/TCG. That is mostly stored like Arkham, binders with spots for individual cards. The only difference is extras beyond a playable collection (4 regular copies and one foil of each card) are basically pointless so those are in boxes for possible trading.
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