General Forum

Just whining here, but for the ninth time in my life, I bought a "complete" hand-collated set of cards. It's never a big deal and you'd think I'd learn, but for the fourth time, it wasn't complete. Sooooo close....two of one card. The next card missing. I'm sure they'll send me the missing card. But how hard is it to check that they're all there? It takes under 10 minutes. You just count from 1 to 300 and see if the little numbers on the card match the numbers you're saying in your head.

Sigh.

v3 

Is it worse when you open a sealed factory set and a card is missing? Can you complain to the company. Oh, wait, they're out of business now.... Just commiserating with you, been there recently myself. Thankkfully the shop owner had a set set on hand and allowed me to go through both to make a complete set. Did him the favor of indicating which ones where missing still

Happened to me once...an Upper Deck Baseball Set. Frustrating!

2010 Topps sealed factory set - missing Delmon Young. No extras. 

1, 2, 3, 4,  Squirrel!!  8, 9, 10, 11, 12,.....

Upper Deck for me too, 2 in one set one year actually. Has also happened in Topps and Fleer. Even got tore up cards out of a Donruss set that was both factory sealed on the outside AND the wrapped bricks inside were still intact

And yes grim, I think the machines chase squirrels too :) Well, something....

I've had this happen so often that I generally will not buy hand collated sets anymore. I've had it happen with factory sets too. At one point I could build an entire top 10 most wanted list out of cards I didn't get from a "complete" set...I can still think of five off the top of my head. And that's not even counting the cards from the one set I bought but the seller stole all the rookies out of. 

Made me laugh. Well played. 

V3

To be fair...some of the set builders are hand collating hundreds of sets.  I've modified my set building efforts over the years so that I think I have a pretty good process to not miss any cards, but I am still human.  And to take a few minutes with each set to go through it another time (with the example you set of 10 minutes, multiplied by 100 sets, adds up to a lot of minutes) is just not possible.

Typically though, you're much better off with hand collated sets from a massive breaker because they *should* be experienced enough to build a ton of sets at once and not make errors.  Most of us are pretty good at it.  But I don't think people fully realize how long it takes to open a case of packs and sort it, let alone multiple cases.

It is a very complicated process, 
what with all that counting and stuff.