wow, so many new decks as of late who can keep up.....
You know for me (and this is just me) I think when some people count their collection, they count every single deck and for a lot of collectors what I see is multiple copies of the same deck repeated. Like, if they get a brick of the same deck - they count that as "12" in their collection and not just "1" I get that.
But for me, having 12 blue rider backs and 13 reds, doesn't "count" as 25... it's just 2. You will probably open a lot of those, play with them, give some away - who knows.
I have 3 piles.
My collection - which is NO duplicates
My cards I play with - duplicates of what I have in my collection
and extra decks I am either going to sell or give away
So when I go to count... which someone asked me do - 503 - that is in my collection... that number is strictly single decks. No duplicates what so ever.
Not trying to brag, but when you count 503 decks, you want to put that number somewhere... so... I put it here.
Most people will break out the numbers separately, especially with larger collections. For example, my collection is somewhere in the ballpark of 1,800 decks of which between 600-700 are unique designs and the rest are extras. I've slowed my purchasing considerably - 1,800 decks doesn't fit very conveniently in the bottom of most closets and could fill perhaps two or more typical desks. And that doesn't include the decks I've been donated for distribution to the children I perform for at the hospital - they're not mine, so they're not part of my collection.
Sports card collectors use a product nicknamed a "monster box" - it's a large, white box made of archival cardboard, devoid of any chemicals that will cause paper to break down over time. Designed to hold 5,000 sports cards spread out over five columns, a monster box can hold 125 typical poker decks just fine. I have perhaps a dozen of those, plus a special set of drawers I use for all my open decks - there are hundreds of them. The drawers are nice - Staples sells them, they're modular and vertically interlocking and each single-high drawer holds 45 decks. For weight-bearing purposes, you don't want to make any single drawer unit you create more than a dozen "drawers" high (some drawers are double-high and hold more), and you can forget about placing the caster wheels on the bottom - they're only going to break under the weight. I have two such units, with some odds-and-ends storage boxes here and there.
The drawers are nearly 100% full. The boxes are also nearly 100% full. I can try a little better organization, but I'm not likely to get more than a few extra decks in there. So I'm carrying roughly 540 decks per drawer unit ties two drawer units, plus 125 decks per monster box times 12 monster boxes, and that's over 2,200 decks - but some of that storage capacity is for donated decks, which is why I estimate my collection size at only 1,800+. It actually might be a little higher, now that I look at the numbers...
