There comes a time with any intellectual property fortunate to be around long enough and build a fanbase large enough where its impact grows beyond its original foundation. Magic: the Gathering, for all it may be thought about nowadays, has made an influence far beyond the black and white borders of its cards. From its outsized influence on CCGs, on the marketplace, and in the tabletop industry writ large to its sprawling story arcs and vehicle for many artists to help establish themselves, many many lives have been affected by the game in some manner. It has launched the game design careers of more than a few (including Richard Garfield himself), and it has entertained countless thousands for hours on end over the years. Pro tournament players, aftermarket product sales, software engineers, content creators – the list goes on. There is an entire ecosystem that exists solely because of this singular game. And while that is not necessarily the most original concept in the world of e-sports, first person shooters, and every Minecraft clone imaginable, the fact it managed to accomplish that level of fandom with a physical product is something to be commended. The game and its surrounding culture is not without its problems (and there are several), but it is inescapable that Magic offers many positive things to many different people.

That being said, at the end of the day it is still just a card game. Which means doing something with those cards of yours.

Whether your primary focus is as a player or a collector, the simple truth is that the longer you’re involved with Magic, the more cards you’re bound to have in your possession. It always starts off as a few stacks of cards here and there. A couple decks. Maybe a binder to help organize or showcase certain cards.

The longer you play, you start to tinker more. Suddenly there may be piles of cards put aside for new deck ideas. Maybe you opened a few packs and didn’t put them away.

One pile is for trading, one is for keeping for later.

That other pile is left over from a draft.

More piles. More stacks. Time to get a box to put them all in.

Well, most them anyway. You’ll want to keep this stack separate because you might do something with them soon. And that pile needs to be in that binder when you get around to it.

And that pile.

And…

Sound familiar?

The singular tell-tale sign of a Magic player or collector who has been doing it awhile is that, inevitably, you end up with small piles and stacks of cards everywhere. It’s like a tiny cardboard infestation. Sure, at some point you’ll put in the concerted effort to find the proper home for them, but inevitably the card sprawl will start anew. That is the plight of any card collector, Magic or otherwise.

Sorting a collection is a chore that is quite known to me. Namely because it is something I had been putting off for years. Like most, it’s one of those things I kept meaning to do, but actually sitting down and sifting through tens of thousands of cards purely for storage and access reasons unsurprisingly always took a back seat to pretty much anything else gaming related. Why spend your time organizing a game when you could be playing one instead? That’s not a hard choice, and one that almost always wins out. So cards just kept ending up in stacks on shelves instead. Then came bigger stacks. Then those got too big and new stacks were started on other shelves.

The problem eventually came to a head. For one, it eventually became a time-consuming chore in and of itself simply trying to find certain cards when I did want to sit and tinker with a deck or two. There were some occasions I would waste significant amounts of time tracking down a handful of cards. At one point when building a pool of cards for a new deck it got so bad I started using slips of paper as proxies because I determined it wasn’t worth the energy plying through pile after pile for a card that may not end up in the final deck anyway. Yet even that didn’t get me to take on the task.

What eventually forced my hand into acknowledging I needed to invest the time and effort to finally sort my cardboard hedge maze into a manageable system was a plain and practical one: a little over two years ago we moved into a new house. Everything had to be packed away. Suddenly all those loose piles and haphazard card stacks on tables and in cubbies had to be boxed up and transported to a new location. They had a new designated space where everything could be easily accessed, and I very much did not want to start off with bad habits. Thus the Great Sorting needed to commence, I told myself.

Fast forward two years, and that process is still only halfway complete. Part of that is because shortly after all that moving came renovations, a baby, and a pandemic, all of which tend to take more priority than sorting a bunch of Magic cards. Part of it also goes back to that simple aforementioned truism: one would rather play games than organize them. So while some of those old stacks are gone, now neatly organized into boxes, several of the old columns still remain. And since Magic moves to an unrelenting drumbeat of product releases, some new stacks have slowly started to appear to replace the old ones. Like laundry and the dishes, if you buy cards with any regular frequency, trying to keep a collection organized is a thankless, endless chore.

However, one upshot is that it does allow you to see the cards you own first-hand, which in turn can either give you new ideas for a card’s usage – or remind you of cards you wanted to use at the time but had forgotten about entirely. And in a recent sorting session I pleasantly came across an instance of the latter, which I’ve now turned into this week’s card pick. Namely because rediscovering older cards is very much part of the EDH philosophy.

Today we have: Profane Memento

Name: Profane Memento

Edition: Magic 2015

Rarity: Uncommon

Focus: Life Gain

Highlights: As a format, Commander comes with its own slate of trends, culture, and meta gameplay even within the larger Magic zeitgeist. Among those are two truths that can be hard to overlook. The first is that unless a deck specifically cares about it from a strategy perspective, many EDH players don’t tend to prioritize life gain all that much since you already start at 40. The second is a propensity to assume that the format only has room for cards that are either powerful or complex. Profane Memento offers a counterargument to both of those.

Like most life gaining cards, Profane Mememnto is incredibly, almost uncharacteristically straightforward. For a single generic mana, this artifact states that whenever a creature card is put in an opponent’s graveyard, you gain 1 life.

That’s it. That’s all it does. If a creature hits the yard, gain a life.

The beauty in this card lies both with its simplicity (it simply works) and its ubiquity (it can be added to literally any Commander deck). Moreover, because it’s life gain 1 point at a time, there’s little concern that it will engender any sort of threat response from other players, giving it an increased chance of sitting around on the table for quite some time – especially if you get it out fairly early.

The only perceived drawback to the card is that its condition for gaining life can seem rather limited to some at first glance. Yes, it is true that you only gain 1 life and only when a card hits a graveyard; this card will not somehow win you the game by itself. But life gain, even at a trickle, often can add up to be quite literally the difference between surviving a pivotal moment in the game or not.

Plus, if you actually think about it, creatures being in graveyards are much more common than creatures merely dying off the battlefield. This includes:

• Creature deaths due to combat, spot removal, damage cards, or board wipes
• Card looting, rummaging, or other draw effects that make you choose X cards
• Mechanics that put cards from the deck directly into the graveyard such as Milling or Dredge
• Forced discards due to spells, effects, or hand size limitations
• Decks that intentionally put creatures in graveyards

When you then multiply all of these possibilities by the number of opponents in a typical Commander game, suddenly the scope of Profane Memento is not nearly as limiting as it may first seem, giving it ample usefulness as a cheap and affordable life gain card. That was what I immediately thought about when it debuted back in M15, and I picked up several copies to be potentially used specifically on that point.

Then they got lost in my morass of loose cards, and eventually floated out of memory. That is, until now.

So, hey, that’s one more reason sorting has paid off! Which is all the more incentive to finish sorting the collection…eventually.

Keep an eye out for us to be regularly featuring other more accessible-but-worth-it Commander cards going forward. In the meantime, we’ll keep the light on for you.

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