How do I start my own token collection?

Question

Accepted Answer

There are thousands of Magic: the Gathering token cards to collect. Before jumping in and trying to collect them all, try to focusing on collecting smaller groups of similar cards first, for example:

Tokens of a certain creature type (E.g. Angel, Beast)
Foil tokens
Full art tokens
Foreign tokens
Promo tokens (E.g. Player rewards, Judge rewards, Pre-release
Token of certain type (E.g. Emblem, Legendary, Artifact)
Tokens from a individual set (E.g. War of the Spark, Unstable, Magic Origins)
Custom tokens (E.g. unofficial and fan tokens)
All tokens by your favourite artist (E.g. Winona Nelson, Kev Walker)

By setting yourself smaller, more achievable goals you'll be able to budget yourself, stay motivated and measure the progression of your collection.

Organising your collection is another thing to consider. The most obvious way would be to order by release set in chronological order. But you could also organise by token type, it is interesting to compare, for example, the artwork of all 2/2 Black Zombie creatures across all the sets of Magic. However you decide to organise it, plan ahead, if you are using page binders you don't want to have to reshuffle thousands of cards every time a new token is released! Remember, every few months Wizards release more sets, decks and promotions with token cards and you'll want to keep the collection up to date.

Finding which tokens you need to collect could take some time, but thankfully you have this website to help! You can browse all the tokens by set page for a complete list of all MTG token cards ordered by set. Or the Token list page for a list of all token cards ordered by token type. Now you know what to collect, you just need to get out and find them! Try looking on eBay for bulk buys, identify which cards are the rare, hard to find or expensive tokens and if you can get these as part of a bulk buy, you may save some cash. Attend events at your LGS and ask or trade people for their booster tokens. Check trading groups and online forums for some of the more obscure and rare tokens. But most importantly of all, have fun with your collection.

View my (out of date) collection of every token card in this blog post. Good luck with your own! Let me know on Twitter how your collection is looking!