Can you please take my subscription off your website, I don’t care if you give me back the money I payed for the 3 months I haven’t even used, just tell me how I unsubscribe.

First separate Modern and Legacy into two piles. Take one set, throw it in a box. This is a very quick and easy way to split it into two more manageable chunks since you just look at the frames. Just before you put legacy away, fan out the cards to the left so you can see if there are any purple symbols for Timeshifted cards.

Second separate into blocks. This takes a bit of practice to memorize the symbols. Arrange them in chronological order to help build the muscle memory. Put the deck in your right hand and push them into your left so you’re just looking at the symbol.

Third is break it down by set.

Lastly I make a 3×6 grid, commons on top, uncommons, rares on the bottom, then left to right, WUBRG and one pile for other. (The “other” pile gets really big in multicoloured sets.) Commons go in the top row since they stack up fastest and get in the way of piling the other rarities. Skip the rarity piles for old sets that didn’t have colour coded rarities.

You can choose to alphabetize from here, or just stack them up and box em knowing you can quickly find whatever you need.

The best part about this is it keeps the bulk of the cards put away so once you’re done a set you have a clean workspace again. Until I got really strict about this, I constantly had every surface of my living room covered in cards. Now I can scoop em up at a moments notice and pick up right where I left off.

Valid points and I appreciate the input on the European market. I do understand that we approached it from a different perspective (given I organized everything first), but I also didn’t just look up every card. I chose the set and filtered by a price I felt was worth my time. In that regard buylisting can be a great way to send off a bunch of random cards you have little to no interest in. I specifically went through the last few blocks (as those were already mostly organized thanks to me playing standard while they were legal) and filtered through the suprising uncommons (Lorescale Coatl’s a good one) and my “bulk rare” box because I already have an out at a certain price so I wasn’t going to look for anything that wasn’t decently higher (50%) in there. If you have your collection organized already, than buylisting (here in the states) is a great way to turn low liquid cards into cash or liquid cards. I sent out 2 buylist orders yesterday that I pulled from my bulk rares and bulk commons/uncommons and they totaled about $50, for 124 cards (many were bulk rares I got at $0.1 in trade). Even with the shipping cost (being around $6.00) the total profit for me was ($50-$6 shipping-$12.40 cost of rares (in trade even)=$31.6) which took me about 3.5 hours to go through (though I honestly spent most of it organizing). With a very organized collection, you can burn through a buylist by set in probably 5-10 minutes.

Shipping to other countries in Europe is more expensive too and not usually feasible unless you’re talking large quantities. Due to the dollar being relatively low versus the euro, sending to American buylists is often not even interesting even if you’d find a way to ship cheaply.

One could argue that Chas is right if you figure in the sorting time for your collection. I keep mine (mostly) sorted anyway, but, a fair comparison would be to start unsorted as well. Not to say he couldn’t have done some things better, sorting by set would be a good start, as WeQu suggested in the comments to Chas’ article, but neither his article nor yours convinces me one way or another. Assuming you start unsorted, would buylisting be interesting for you?