How do you sort your trading cards? If you ask me, there’s only one correct way: alphabetical. If I’m building a deck, I need to be able to find the cards I want to use quickly, and there’s no better way to sort through a big pile of cards than to put them in alphabetical order.
I know this isn’t the way everyone does it - and I learned the hard way some people are very passionate about their preferred sorting style whenI poked fun at the rarity dividers in the Ursula’s Return Illumineer’s Trove- but you’re able to’t convince me there’s a more efficient way to organize your thousands of trading cards than alphabetical.
When a particular card pops into my mind I don’t have to remember its cost, its rarity, or any of its stats and abilities. With my system, when I want to find the Kit Cloudkicker from Into the Inklands, I know exactly where to look: in between Jetsam and Lyle Tiberius Rourke.
For the entire first year of Lorcana, the set numbering matched my preferred organization method perfectly. Every 204-card set divided the cards into color groups, then numbered them alphabetically by card type starting with characters, then actions, then items, and finally locations. It was a beautiful numbering system that made sorting and cataloging my cards easy. That entire numbering system is changing with the new Shimmering Skies expansion, and I have no idea what to do about it.
Lorcana players picked up on the change quickly. When a set of Ruby Taffyta Muttonfudge cards were revealed during the Shimmering Skies Lorecast numbered 103, 114, and 117,fans immediately noticedthat the cards were no longer numbered alphabetically. There was some hope that a new ordering system would reveal itself as more cards were spoiled, but now that we’ve seen the entire set, it’s clear that there’s no logical organization whatsoever. The set is still broken down by color and card type, but within those subcategories, it’s a total free for all.
This is most noticeable with characters that have multiple cards, like Taffyta. You’ll also find three Fix-It Felix Jr. cards scattered throughout Amber, three Maleficents spread randomly across Amethyst, and three Robin Hoods mixed up in Emerald. Not only are the cards in a seemingly random order, but the numbering feels intentionally hostile in some places. For example, this set includes Sleeping Beauty’s fairy godmothers in Emerald, numbered 75, 76, and 78. A Robin Hood is 77, stuck right in the middle of the trio.
Lorcana’s community and engagement manager Richelle Brady explained the new numbering system on the official Discord server, saying, “They were only ever alphabetical in English, with more and more languages being added it didn’t make sense to continuously change collector numbers of the whole set any time there was a change to a card name in English.”
That’s not an unreasonable explanation. From a development point of view, a lot, if not all of the cards go through changes during the early iteration process, and it makes sense that trying to keep them all in alphabetical order would slow that process down considerably, while only benefiting the English version. I can appreciate that this system might have created too much work for the developers, but the new system is creating too much work forme.
Of course, there’s nothing stopping me from continuing to sort my cards in alphabetical order. I could ignore the numbers, as a lot of people seem to, and put them in the order that makes the most sense to me. The problem is, how will I ever know what cards I’m missing?
I have to keep the cards in number order to keep track of my collection. I use the official Lorcana app to catalog my cards as I slowly build my collection up to five of each (four for a playset and one for my master set binder). The app shows the cards in number order, so if I sort my physical cards alphabetically, they’ll be in a completely different order. I would just sort the cards in the app into alphabetical order, but that’s not an option. You can only sort by card number, cost, Strength, or Willpower. Unless you can memorize the cost of every card in Shimmering Skies, there’s no way to sort them in a searchable order.
Could I migrate my catalog to a different database like Dreamborn.ink? Sure, that’s an option. Could I keep my cards in set number order then cross-reference the number of the cards I’m looking for in the app by searching for their name before I go digging through my inventory? Yes, that could work. I will find new ways to work with the cards, but no matter what I decide to do it will be significantly harder to organize my cards than it used to be. I understand that the old system only worked for English speakers, but the new system doesn’t work for anyone.
