Looking After a Collection
Boxes warp, cards wear and inserts are mostly useless. Some practical notes.
Store them upright
Stacking boxes flat crushes the lower ones and warps the lids over a year or two, particularly the large square boxes that hold the most weight. Stored on their edge like books, they take the load through the strongest part of the structure.
The trade-off is that components shift inside, so anything with a loose insert needs bagging first. This is the single most common piece of storage advice in the hobby and also the most commonly ignored.
The insert is usually the problem
Most factory inserts are vacuum-formed trays designed to hold the components in the exact configuration they left the factory in, which no player ever reproduces. They waste space and they make setup slower.
Removing the insert and using bags is faster to pack, faster to set up and usually halves the depth the box needs. Keep the insert if you might sell the game on; otherwise it is packaging.
Sleeves, honestly
Card sleeves are worth it for games with heavy shuffling and small decks, and largely a waste on games where cards are laid out and picked up once. The wear pattern that actually kills a deck is repeated riffling, not handling.
They also change the box maths considerably. A sleeved deck can be nearly double the depth, which is how people end up buying a bigger box for a game they already own.
Heat and damp, not light
Sunlight fades box art, which is cosmetic. Damp warps board panels and delaminates card, which is terminal. A loft or a garage is a worse home for a collection than a sunny living room shelf, whatever it looks like.
If a shelf feels cold to the back of the hand, it is probably against an outside wall, and that is where the damage starts.
If the collection has outgrown the shelf, the honest fix is usually not more storage. Most large collections contain a substantial number of games that have been played once, and passing those on costs nothing and solves the problem permanently.