What to do with the various Magic cards we end up owning

I continue to think about this issue because I want to be able to play every single card I pull online and every single card I pull from physical boosters AND every single card I buy from eBay. This is the concept of maximum use: How do I use every card from when I get it to find a home for it where I can play it, or at least collect it willingly. The worst fate for a card is for it to be sitting in a box somewhere with no one interested in looking at it as a collectable or playing it in a deck.

Here are my current rules:

1. Rares and mythic rares become collectables and I look at them often. Some junk rares I keep to put into play decks or a cube, but the vast majority of these cards end up in my collectable "nice" binder.

2. Innistrad Block and M13 commons are in a junk cube. This cube is close to 1500 cards and fits neatly into three fat pack boxes.

3. The Avacyn Restored playset is its own peasant cube, although at 600 plus cards, I cannot fit it into a single fat pack box. I would like to combine this set with a second set. The current candidate is Rise of the Eldrazi, which, like AVR, is large enough to draft individually, is the third set in a Large-Small-Large block, and is only loosely thematically connected with the other two sets in the Zendikar block.

 

4. Random cards from several eBay purchases.....a few 8th Edition, the Scars of Mirrodin commons that are left over from opening a booster box, additional commons from ISD Block and M13. This is my pool of cards for future cubes.

5. A small cube I am putting together with Ravnica Block and Shards of Alara block, with many of these cards, of course, hybrids and multicolored. I would like to add Shawdomoor and Eventide to these. This cube feeds from 11 expansion sets! These sets are: Shadowmoor, Eventide, Ravnica, Guildpact, Dissension, Shards of Alara, Conflux, Alara Reborn, Return to Ravnica, and the two remaining sets as of now unissued from the RTR block. I am sure by the end of the RTR block we will all be ready to move on from multicolored cards. Right now, though, as they say, they are "all the rage."

6. Various high repetition ISD Block cards and a few slightly bent or slightly damaged cards. These I use to make casual decks. I already have five monocolor decks built from these.

O.K., so I can find a home for almost every card now in my possession. The next issue is how do I make the cubes more playable? They are playable as they are, but the ISD Block + M13, the AVR playset, and the 11 set block cubes are mostly composed of commons. Commons don't have the complex effects that we find in the super cards-Snapcaster Mage, Olivia Voldaren, Huntmaster of the Fells; or the planeswalkers, especially the more playable ones like Tamiyo, the Lilianas, Gideon Jura, Karn Liberated, and others.

This army of commons over time becomes a zombie army of unplayable cards. This is especially true in the formats with more sets, such as Vintage, Legacy, Extended, and Modern. It is also true in Standard. If you build a deck with 4 Tamiyo, 4 Liliana of the Veil, and a few good creatures and dual lands, your games will go much better than if you assemble a deck from one of my three junk cubes. That is the reality of how Magic works.

The Pauper (all commons) and Peasant (commons and uncommons) formats are very useful to play these cards but except for when we use these cards in draft or sealed format, the natural progression is to end up using the same dozen cards for a given type of deck and to assemble the handful of decks that work well. Even in these most inclusive formats there is still an army of relatively unplayable commons and smaller one of uncommons.

Commander (EDH) to some extent began to solve the problem of unplayable rares and mythic rares by giving legendary creatures a new format to shine in. True, there are many legendary creatures that were neither designed with Commander (EDH) in mind, nor are playable in that format. For example, a legendary creature with an ability that requires sacrifice to exile is not useful as the commander card in the deck. It is a fair statement that many rares that have over the years become unplayable in Modern have found a home in Commander (EDH) either as the commander or as one of the supporting 99 cards in the deck. But even after solving this problem, there aren't as many rares and mythic rares as there are commons and uncommons.

And all this leads to my as-of-yet unanswered question: how do I make the army of commons that I have in now three separate cubes more playable than what it says on the card?

I have only been playing Magic for five months and therefore have a hard time taking my own ideas for how to expand the game too seriously but I am sure this thought is in the mind of every Magic player with more than 2,000 commons in one box or another-and that's every Magic player, almost.

I don't have an answer....I will keep thinking about it, though.