General Forum

I started collecting baseball album stickers and cards when I was around 7 years old as a way to get interested in sports. Soon after, I started following the Phillies, then I got into Little League Baseball, I went to my first Phillies game (box seats down the 1B line!) and I've loved sports ever since. Eventually I got interested in the Eagles and NFL too, then basketball after going to my first Sixers game when I was 14, then the Flyers and NHL after they traded for Lindros. Cards became my hobby because I loved sports and I enjoyed the challenge of trying to complete a set, and it didn't require lots of extra equipment or physical labor like golf or hiking or fishing ... just money and patience. Even if I couldn't get every possible insert card, I wanted to at least get the base sets, but with limited resources before college, that was always tough. As an adult with expendable income, it brings me joy to be able to go back and complete sets and get those cards I couldn't get when I was younger, and thanks to this site, I was able to find other things I didn't even know existed (like the 1980s Topps Glossy Rookie sets!). I mentioned it before, but being able to buy the 1984 Fleer Update set a few years after graduating college was one of the highlights of my collecting. In recent years, now that I only collect Upper Deck hobby hockey, the joy comes from getting a Young Guns card in a pack and knowing I won't have to spend almost $100 on it on ebay.

My biggest thrill collecting is completing sets.....(I"m still chasing my 84 Fleer Update....down to 2...Oh Roger)......I remember when I was younger sorting stacks upon stacks of 81 topps and thinking that the 77 backs were cool since it looked like a billboard.  Nowadays, I collect for the investment (hahahaha).....no, I collect to build sets too and when I first got back into the hobby, it was pretty exciting pulling a SN card....but that has quickly worn off.....I try for the base of main sets and if I get close, then I will add those onto my want list.....now, my thrill is actually just looking at online auction houses that do the household and other auctions and looking for cards in there and hoping to hit a gem or at least something to pass the time.  I have about 4 or 5 binders full of cards to pull and add onto here, but it just comes down to getting the time.   

I still love going through my cards and reminiscing about cards from the past....and slowly trying to fill the gap from when I wasn't collecting.  

I was lucky when I was younger that both my father and my mother but fed/encouraged my card collecting, so I still have ton's of the "junk" era at their house.......working on that too :)  I may be done by the time I can retire and my sons can want nothing at all to do with them :)  hahahaha

My parents thought my collecting was a phase, boy were they wrong.

I am finishing up college now, but I have more expendable income than most (thank you ESPN College Gameday). One thing that I miss is finishing a set with limited funds. This was especially challenging given that I started collecting in '07 -- when Topps flagship packs were $2 a pop. Thats brutal on a 9 year old's wallet. Thankfully, I had a relatively generous allowance that allowed me to get 5-6 packs every month or so. But back to my point, I really miss that feeling of completing a set I got back in the day. To finish Topps flagship set now is like meh, whatever. I usually buy a jumbo box of series 1 and series 2 which gets me very close with few dupes. I miss that feeling of buying my 5-6 packs and hoping/praying that I didn't pull any dupes. I miss my early days on sportscardfun.com (now called samstradingpost.com) as a dumb kid trading with strangers online (much to my parent's horror) to finish the sets I had holes in. The first set I ever finished was 2010 Topps and man, when that last batch of cards came in the mail, I was the happiest kid alive. 

Again, it just goes to show that its about the journey. When I finally add that last 2009 SP Authentic Griffey card, thats going to be a great day. Ive been hunting it for around 5 years now to no avail. Ditto for the 2011 Bowman's Best Refractor Pujols. 

I collected back in the '80s and early 90's and then due to travel, marriage, raising a family was out until this year. COVID caused me to pull out my old cards (Kirby Puckett is the one card I never really stopped collecting). I never collected as an investment but rather because I love baseball. Looking at my old cards gave me the itch again especially coming across names of players that I forgot about that are not Hall of Fame caliber but that I liked such as Tony Fernandez, Juan Samuel, Kent Tekulve, Howard Johnson, or Oscar Gamble (greatest hair of all time). I always tried to complete at least one set a year when I was actively collecting in the past and am carrying that on again. This year my main goal is to complete the 2020 Donruss as the 1986 set was one of my favorites back in the day. As a side affect of collecting again I am more in tune with all of the players and not just my beloved Twins.

I also collect for the sake of enjoyment. Is it great to find an "expensive" card at a good price? Sure, it's nice to know that those savings will afford me extra money for other purchases. But, I don't collect for value, I really enjoy the "oddball" sets, the cards of players with a stories behind them,, and other oddities. I also collect ticket stubs, and programs. (I especially love the old programs because they not only describe the game itself, but they contain a slice of the history related to it's time through advertisemnts, articles, prices, and photos.) While it's certainly nice to own a card that has a high "monetary value", it doesn't really hold any more importance to me than "common" cards from the same era or set. I have never sold a card, but I've given some away.

Obviously everyone collects in their own way but as with you @Slug03 I find those experiences of snapping up some cards at a great price that have meaning to me or are part of a PC far outweigh the significance of cards that just have a high $ figure associated with them.

I am not great on market values but of the cards I own of the four I perceive to have the highest market value two would probably not make my collections top 1000 for interest to me and the other two may crack my top 50. I have a small selection of 25 cards displayed in my house and none of these four are in it. (My 8 year old nephew always asks which of my cards are worth the most and I have to say they are stashed away in the closet, then he looks at we like I am a weirdo. He probably has a point but I am just not that in to those cards!).

Another forum I belong to just seems to be a continual posting of the latest sparkley Zion/Doncic/Trae Young Prizm/Spectra/Optic cards with everyone owing and ahing over them. Just seems like such a repition of the same old (new) same old (new). Nothing different, nothing unique, no story behind any of them, no history.

Then half of them seem to end up in a for sale thread within minutes of them being posted in a mailday/PC/box break thread. "Oh, I've been waiting months for this card to come from the US. I am so excited to have it in my PC. It is so cool. For sale $650." Rinse and repeat.

About the only thing that breaks the monotany is an occassional Kobe, LeBron, MJ or Giannis post.

Just seems like there are few people that actually collect for the sake of collecting and while the majority rail against it, deep down, most "collectors" are really just investors.

That is why I find these forums a lot more refreshing!

The fun. The hunt. No more multiple card shops in town. No more card trading shows. Ugh. I found a card shop 30 minutes from home. Checked it out. He had boxes ,boxes of just Packers. I was melting. Spent 3 weeks there on and off going through them.. the first day I had 2 over full handful stacks. I thought,crap, this gonna cost me.  I had over 150 cards. He says . $9. REALLY?, I kept coming back. He had others coming in daily opening all those cases and boxes looking for the $$ cards. It was fun listening to their excitement for 3 weeks. I finally made it through all the boxes.. Dang I thought. So I opened my trap mouth and asked.. “hey these boxes are just sitting around, could I buy 3 of them for a reasonable price?”  He says sure.. Fingers through them a bit.. $140. I left with thousands of just Packer cards.. Home.. Smiling and giddy. I go through them again. Find more for my PC. And I discovered Tcdb.. so here I am. Loving trading again. Not spending $$$$$ on eBay. I like many others had stopped because of kids, marriage. But retirement 4 yrs ago. I pulled them out. Yes haa. I don’t value them for $$ in a trade. I need some, you need some. Great. Sure some cards we want a few more for it, but nothing of $$ value to me. You don’t have any Packers on my wantlist, fine, offer me some good traders that I can use with others. That’s what it is for me. A card arrives dinged... ooohhh welll. It’s ink on cardboard. I spend more on my Budlight.. lol. I love picking up the garage clearing collection also. Fun to see what you may find. One for the PC or some good traders. Or dang, that’s a cool card, I’m keeping it.

Enjoy. When we are gone, the cards are still here and worthless to us now.. chuckle chuckle. But some memories to others who experienced sharing their lives with us while we were here collecting like kiddos..

So those family combo collectors (Siblings). Take in those moments. Share your Love.

Donn from Green Bay.. 

Great thread, great stories everyone. I quit collecting ages ago but have succumbed recently to buying hundreds of Red Sox cards in a perilous attempt to collect team sets. I enjoyed thumbing through them all, exhaustively putting them in pages, and reading up on the stats/info on the backs. I agree with others in that as long as one doesn't get to caught up in the money aspect of the hobby, it can be a lot of fun hunting down some memories.

Love these stories, and I'd like to join in. I began collecting as a kid, buying wax packs at the convenience store or the drug store across the street from my elementary school. I began collecting seriously through middle school and high school. In college, not so much. I picked back up after college, but eventually, the cards went into the top shelves of a couple of closets. I had a house to pay off, after all!

About three months ago, I picked it back up -- after a hiatus of 28 years. Fortunately, I did a wonderful job of storing my cards. Everything is in the condition it should be. After discovering the fantastic TCDb website, I began cataloging all of my cards. Only nine were missing. None very valuable. Six clearly must've fallen out of a box over the years or I mistakenly marked them on a checklist despite not actually having them. Three others were stolen by my then-12-year-old cousin, who slept in my room while I was off at college. When I told mom recently that I was missing those cards, she mentioned that she thinks she knows what happened -- she told me about that visit from my klepto cousin, who was asking about my baseball card collection at the time.

I've bought some great cards in the past three months. To go to the original point about the joy of collecting, I recently bought three boxes of cards that were still in wax packs. Nothing valuable. (1990-91 Fleer basketball, 1989 Topps football, 1989 Donruss baseball.) I just wanted to experience the fun of opening some wax packs again.