I still have a loose pile of Phyrexia: All Will Be One cards sitting in a shoebox on my shelf. It’s been over three years. Every time I look at it I think “I should really sort those.” I pulled a Venerated Rotpriest at that prerelease and I’m genuinely not sure if it’s in the shoebox or in my trade binder. Could be either.
Secrets of Strixhaven prerelease runs April 17-23, and if you’re going (you should, Strixhaven is a great limited environment), you’re going to come home with somewhere between 80 and 150 cards depending on how many events you play and how much trading you do. The Mystical Archive is back, which means every single pack has a bonus instant or sorcery with alternate art. That’s a lot of cards that need to go somewhere.
I don’t want to tell you how to build your sealed deck. Plenty of other sites do that better than I ever could. I want to talk about the part nobody writes about: what do you do with all of it when you get home Sunday night?
The prerelease haul
A single Secrets of Strixhaven prerelease kit gives you six boosters (five Draft Boosters plus one College Booster seeded to your chosen school), a stamped foil promo, and a spindown. So that’s roughly 85-90 cards right there, including at least six Mystical Archive cards. Play a second event, or do some trading between rounds, and you’re easily over 120.
The Mystical Archive cards are the tricky ones. In the original Strixhaven, these were some of the most valuable pulls because of the alternate art frames. Cards like Demonic Tutor and Swords to Plowshares in that etched style held value for years. Secrets of Strixhaven is bringing the Archive back with new selections, and I’d bet the Japanese alt-art variants will be worth tracking carefully once prices stabilize.
Six Mystical Archive cards across your Draft Boosters, plus whatever you pull from Set Boosters or prize packs. Some of these will be bulk uncommons. Some might be $15-20 cards in their first week. You won’t know which is which unless you check.
Don’t wait until Tuesday
So yeah, prerelease weekend. You play two or three events. You trade with some people between rounds, maybe pick up a couple singles from the store’s case because they’re running a sale. You get home Sunday and your backpack has cards in four different places: your sealed pool, your sideboard leftovers, a small stack of trades, and whatever you impulse-bought.
The move is to deal with it that night. Or Monday morning at the latest. Not because the cards will go bad (they’re cardboard, they’re fine), but because you’ll forget what you paid for things, you’ll forget which cards were trades versus pulls, and prerelease weekend prices are volatile. That $8 rare might be $3 by Friday. Or $15. Either way, you want to know where it is.
I used to tell myself I’d sort them later and “later” turned into that Phyrexia shoebox situation. Now I just scan everything the night I get home, while I’m still in that post-event buzz where sorting cards feels fun instead of like homework.
The scan-everything-first approach
Here’s what works for me. Empty everything out of the bag onto the table. Don’t try to sort by color or rarity or set. Just make one pile.
Then scan through the whole stack. Every card, including the draft chaff, including the basic lands if you want (I usually skip those). The point isn’t to evaluate every card individually. The point is to get them all into your collection in one pass so you have a complete record of what you pulled. It takes maybe 20 minutes for 100 cards once you get a rhythm going.
The foils and the Mystical Archive cards might need a little more attention. Foil Strixhaven cards with that etched treatment can throw off scanners if there’s glare, so adjust your angle. I wrote a whole post about scanning foils if you want the details on that.
Once everything’s scanned, then you sort. But now you’re sorting with information. You can see the total value of your prerelease haul. You know which of those Mystical Archive pulls are actually worth something and which are the Opt reprint that’ll be fifty cents forever.
What goes where
After the scan pass, I split cards into three piles. The keepers go into binders (anything I want for a deck, anything with sentimental value, and honestly sometimes just cards I think look cool). The trade pile goes into a separate section. And the bulk goes into a box.
The thing about prerelease cards is that some of them will spike and some will crater within the first two weeks. If you scanned everything on Sunday night, you can check back Thursday and see what moved. Maybe that uncommon Mystical Archive card that was worthless is suddenly in a Standard deck. Maybe the mythic you were excited about turns out to be unplayable and drops to $2. You can make informed decisions about what to trade because you actually know what you have and what it’s priced at.
I know some people think tracking the dollar value of their collection is, I don’t know, too transactional or something? Like it takes the fun out of it. And honestly, maybe they’re right. I go back and forth on this. Sometimes I wish I could just enjoy the cards without thinking about whether Archmage’s Charm is going up or down. But then I remember the time I traded away a Ragavan at my LGS for like $12 in store credit two days before it hit $80, and I think okay, maybe paying a little attention to prices is worth it.
The Strixhaven-specific stuff
Five colleges means five different prerelease kits. You pick your college (Silverquill, Prismari, Witherbloom, Quandrix, or Lorehold, each mapped to an enemy color pair), and your seeded booster has cards that match. If you’re playing multiple events, you might pick different colleges each time.
This matters for your collection because you’ll end up with a heavy skew toward certain color pairs. My first Strixhaven prerelease back in 2021 I played Prismari twice and ended up with about 30 blue-red cards and barely any green-black. Wasn’t really thinking about collection balance at the time, but looking back, I had gaps in my Witherbloom stuff for months until I started trading for it.
The Commander precons are the other thing. There are five of them, one per college. If you’re a Commander player and you’re already at the store for prerelease, you’ll probably grab one. That’s another 100 cards. At that point you’re genuinely looking at 200+ cards from a single weekend, which is, look, that’s a lot. You could scan the Commander deck separately and add it to its own binder to keep things clean.
Pack a bag like you mean it
Few things I bring to every prerelease that help with the post-event sort:
A deckbox for your actual deck (obviously). But also a second empty deckbox or a ziplock bag for your sideboard and leftovers. Keeping your “didn’t make the cut” pile separate from your “cards I traded for between rounds” pile saves you ten minutes of confusion later. I bring a small binder too, not my main one, just a pocket binder with maybe 20 slots, for anything valuable I pull that I don’t want sitting loose in a bag.
Sleeves. Bring more than you think you need. You’ll want to sleeve anything worth more than a few bucks before it goes in the bag, and prerelease weekend is when cards are most likely to get dinged up because everyone’s shuffling unsleeved decks on cafeteria tables.
That’s about it really. Come home, dump everything out, scan the stack, sort with prices visible, put things where they go. Twenty minutes of effort that saves you from the shoebox problem. I’m still mad about that Rotpriest.