If I had to guess I last played Magic: The Gathering in 2005. I went to a card shop (a type of place I spent approximately no time, even then,) to hang out with a friend who was hopelessly addicted to the stuff, and played a pickup game with one of the local card sharks. It went poorly, and I swore off the habit for good.

Except every once in a while it manages to get its claws back into me. Like a belligerent crab with a gambling addiction. “Just another pack,” it burbles in crabspeak.

Last year Duskmourn came out with my heart squarely in its targeting reticule. Analog horror where the house is also a moth? Say less, sis.

The only problem? I knew I wouldn’t actually get back into playing. Look; maybe some people can pretend like they’ve got infinite time. I have the strictly opposite problem. I am, if anything, too aware of how little time I have. It’s not possible to do everything I want to do in a day, and every additional thing has to be at the expense of something else I’ve already decided is a priority.

But that’s okay. Lots of people buy books they’ll never read, movies they’ll never watch. Buying games you’ll never play is most of Steam’s business model. What if I just collected some Magic cards? As a treat?

This is basically, more or less, how I got into collecting set binders. Not for every set, but just for the ones that were both obtainable and thematically interesting to me. I decided not to go back and try to collect stuff that was no longer in print, because that’s a potentially infinite fractal and also risks getting quite expensive.

A smarter person would have done this by just buying singles. It’s by far the cheapest way to go about it. Being the contrarian I am, I decided to go the route of mostly buying packs. Why? Honestly, because they’re kind of fun to open. I’m largely immune to the siren call of gambling. The casino holds no power over me. But cracking a fresh pack of trading card product? That’s a high like no other.

One of the biggest reasons cracking packs isn’t the cost-effective way to collect a set is that you end up with a ton of duplicates. Depending on how many boosters I buy, it’s not impossible to get 10 or 20 of some cards, where I arguably only need one for the binder.

What to do with the rest?

Originally, I’d take all of my extra cards and try to trade them in for credit, then use that credit to fill in gaps where I hadn’t lucked into a card. This… Works? But you lose a lot of value in the process. If a card is worth $10 on resale it might be worth $0.50 in trade. Sure, I probably could try to sell them myself, but what hobby am I giving up to do that? Exactly.

I sold all my valuable extras for Duskmourn, but never repeated the process for Edge of Eternities. I’ve got a huge card box filled to the brim with cards that I mostly don’t need, because I don’t actually play the game. What to do?

The last piece fell into place recently in the form of a medium-popularity (but growing) format for Magic: cube.

The extremely TL;DR of cube is this: pretend that the only cards that exist are one person’s curated best-of list. That’s it. That’s the gimmick.

Cube is mostly presented as a draft format. Some friends get together and open “booster packs” from that curated setlist and build decks on the fly then play each other. I’m not really a fan of draft, but I can see the appeal. Also you get the fun of opening packs for cards you already own, which is definitely something I can get behind.

So I started thinking, what if I built a cube out of each of the sets I’ve decided to collect? That way, in some hypothetical future, if I ever do have the time to play, I can play a version of Magic that’s effectively “pinned” to the release of the sets I find most thematically interesting. I definitely wasn’t playing Magic when Duskmourn came out, but that’s an experience I can recreate at any time thanks to cube.

That became last weekend’s project. We culled my entire remaining Duskmourn collection into basically two categories. I have the collection binder, which has one of every card that came out. It’s basically an art book of Magic cards, and it’s a lot of fun to flip through. Then, I’ve got a box filled with actual playable cards, according to the basic rubric of 1 for each rare, two for each uncommon, and four for each common.

Later this year I plan to pick up some support products designed to hold reconstructed “booster packs” for the cube format so that I can properly store the Duskmourn cube, and this weekend I’m planning to go through the same process for Edge of Eternities.

All of the rest of my cards were donated to my fiancé, who operates a card shop and can sell them as inventory.

Now I’ve got the best of both worlds. I have my collection binder, and I have a frozen-in-time cube that would let me play the game, as it existed at the time, if I ever find the time to do it.