You see, I've been buying card game cards since college... and I have kept every single wrapper and box since then. Every booster and starter has been stuffed into a giant cardboard hidden downstairs. Yes, this is crazy. Those wrappers are trash. But I've always liked seeing the design and layout of the packaging - especially the umpteen million Pokemon starter boxes - so I've never been able to throw anything out.

About a year ago I decided to stop keeping the wrappers - Step One - so I've been tossing the new stuff (except for a couple samples for posterity), but this box still held almost a decade's worth of gaming refuse. It needed dealt with.

As I tore through the pile, I found many many examples of a mania left unchecked: an entire box of empty Ice Age starters, at least five Boot Hill booster boxes, six Pokemon Thundershock Gift Sets, at least one box of every single OverPower expansion, stacks of Middle Earth supplementary rules cards. I even found one OverPower box filled with thirty random unopened booster packs. They remain unopened. Of course the saddest moments came upon opening a particularly lame box and finding a cash register receipt still inside among all the empty wrappers. Fallen Empires, ugh.

I filled one trash bag with the booster wrappers and another with what starter boxes I could bear to throw out. I did keep plenty, especially the display boxes because they still look cool. (The original Doomtown display boxes have those great die-cut swinging saloon doors on the front!) But I did manage to cut the original collection down to half of what it was.

The entire pile.

Trash bag of boosters.

Trash bag of starters.

Unopened OverPower boosters, now available at a great price.

One more thing: Remember the Magic Unglued set, the comedy one where all the cards were silly and/or stupid? When we assembled a complete set of Unglued (I bought an entire box the week the set was released), we noticed that the teeny tiny copyright text seemed to have random words inserted into it. Putting the cards in numerical order, you create the following message from Wizards:

Here are some cards that didn't make it to print; Socks of Garfield, Hot Monkey Love, Colonel Squee's Play, Banned In France, Spoon, Disrobing Sceptre, Butt Wolf, Lotus Roach, Sesame Afreight, Needless Reminder Text, Chicken Choker, Clockwork Doppleganger, Hen Weigh, Help I'm Trapped In Carti Mundi, Mad Cow, Poke, Lord of Wombats, Gratuitous Babe Art, Brothers' War Bonds, Dwarven Kickboxer, Mickey's Drunk, Pact With The Wastes, Circle of Protection: Body Odor, Urza's Chia Pet, Thallad Shooter, Shoelace, When Chihuahuas attack, Wall of Cookies, Kobold Ninja, Mucus Sore, Kjeldoran Outhouse, Bear in the Woods, Dental Thrull, Flavatog, Cereal Killer.