How pricey is pricey?
Well these are from Ikea, $119.00. If I did my math right you should be able to fit 132 decks per drawer (On there side, 6 across x 22 deep) making that 792 decks per unit. It has drawer stops and made of press board with veneer. It measures approx. 26H x 26W x 18D.
I still kind of like them because while it's veneer, it looks more like furniture and not storage bins.
That's true.
Did you notice in the photo that the top three drawers are less tall than the bottom three? You'll want to insure the skinny drawers can still hold properly-stacked decks.
If I went with all regular-size drawers in my units, there'd be twelve, each with 45 decks, total of 540. It is much less "furniture-y", true enough, but it also occupies a much smaller footprint and is taller - two units side-by-side would roughly equal the square footage of that unit, adding up to 1,080 decks.
But there's no denying that my wife would be far more pleased if my units looked more like furniture, less like storage!
Just make sure of one thing. I previously stored a lot of decks - about a gross - in a dresser drawer. A gross is 144, barely more than one of your drawers can hold. It wasn't meant to take the weight and eventually collapsed, destroying the framework in the dresser and resulting in it being trashed and replaced and the decks being moved elsewhere. Check out just how much weight the drawers can actually support before reaching the breaking point - you wouldn't want to place more than perhaps half of that weight in any one drawer. The weight will be more distributed over a larger area, to be sure, but it may be lacking adequate support in the center to manage the "sag" that can occur, especially when the drawer's bottom sags enough to come out of the slots in the drawer's walls that hold it in place. If the support along the drawer bottom is minimal, consider reinforcing it with some straps and wood slats - the strap gets screwed in at the back and front of the bottom of the drawer into the framework and the slats fill the gap between the straps and the drawer bottom, creating a supporting structure underneath.
I was able to eliminate that problem using the plastic storage drawers. Technically, each drawer is an independent construct and they're stacked into sets to create larger units. Each individual drawer is physically capable of supporting the full weight of the contents inside and the plastic used is a bit softer, with a bit more "give" than rigid wood furniture. There's just the right amount of flexibility to the units when stacked that they can even sway a bit without breaking, which they do when I'm shifting them, but when stacked and stationary, they're supported and strong enough so they don't sway or even budge all that much when fully loaded.
