I’ve been playing Magic: the Gathering - a collectible card game published by Wizards of the Coast (WotC) - since 1994. It plucks a lot of my strings: it’s fantasy themed; it’s art-forward; it’s a complex math-based game; it requires exploration and interaction with other players; and, importantly, it’s collectible. I’m very much a completionist in many aspects of life, not least of which is collecting Magic. Recently though, I found myself in need of additonal tools to manage my collection.
My lofty goal for collecting Magic is no less than to collect one of each card from Magic’s history.
Back in the early days, it was pretty tough to collect all of the cards. Supply was constrained - most stores in my area sold out within hours of receiving any stock. Card lists were not pulished by the makers of the game. The Internet was nascent, and online resources were non-existent. All of this is to say that it was hard to get cards and it was nearly impossible to know what the complete set of cards was. These elements were absolutely by design, because exploration was a key feature of the game.
Today, exploration as a feature of the game is still present, but discovering how many and what cards are in a set has become trivially easy. WotC understands this, and so they have, over the years, added information both on and off of the cards to make it easier for collectors to do our thing. For example, each card now contains a number known as the card’s “collector number.” WotC also now publishes card lists in various formats.
I’ve been using the Deck Checklist documents published by WotC to keep track of the cards in my physical collection. This works well, as these lists generally contain all of the cards available in booster packs… with a few exceptions.
Deck checklists are designed to track decklists for tournament play, so they don’t track cards that aren’t necessary for that purpose. For example, there are usually 3 different versions of each of the 5 basic lands in a set, totaling 15 cards, each with its own collector number. Deck checklists track the number of each land used, but not the versions. More examples: deck checklists don’t track promotional printings of cards. Deck checklists don’t track tokens. Deck checklists don’t track cards only available in Planeswalker Decks. And so on.
Since this is a small number of extra cards, I track them with annotations on the deck checklist. It’s pretty easy to scribble in 20-30 additional cards, if needed.
Recently, though, WotC has been publishing additional versions of cards in booster packs with different “treatments.” They’ve also added a large number of promotional printings to each set. These versions aren’t listed on the deck checklists, of course.
Between the types of cards I mentioned above, and the large number of new versions of cards being printed, I needed an additional kind of checklist to help me keep track of all of the cards I need to collect. I used Scryfall’s excellent card search engine to prepare a card list and my word processor to create this Core Set 2021 Extended Collection Checklist.
Please enjoy, and I welcome feedback on Twitter. Cheers!