General Forum

I leave blank spots for any missing cards, then if the cards are in Team/LastName alphabetical order and there are several empty spots next to each other, I'll make a small paper checklist of what I'm missing, fold it up and slide it into one of the pockets for quick reference of what goes where.

Turns out it was not too difficult for me to generate these.  For those technically inclined, I was able to use the ReportLab library in Python to generate a PDF containing a table that has cells the proper size of a trading card.  So I just need to pull out the card details from my spreadsheet into a file for the script to read, and it will generate the PDF of placeholders for me.

Here are a couple photos of my first attempt: https://imgur.com/a/9M4HANR

The card size is a little small because my printer settings resized the page, they should end up being the normal size.  Also, the binder is not actually organized, I just put them in the pages to see how the looked.

If this is of general interest I could try making a small web site so that folks can generate these.  It would be something like you provide a comma separated list of card details in a text box and then it would give you the PDF.  No promises of when I would be able to finish making a site like this though :).

Haha thats funny.  I thought I was the only person that does that.  All I do is cut out paper to the size of a card and put the name, number and a value on it.  I put the value on it so when I look for that card it gives me a rough idea on the price.

Trade On!

Slick! Looks nice.

I was inspired by something similar when remembering stamp collection albums.  You can see your progress towards completeness, what is missing and it puts each card into it's place in the collection. 

The key for me is defining the collection so that it has a reasonable chance at being completed and ideally not with many expensive cards that would generate place holders for cards I know I would never acquire. 
 

Thanks for sharing.   Nicely done

It sounds like it all comes down to how nice you want it to look for the temp solution.  When I was younger and my dad came to card shows with me, he would try to collect a single team so he had a binder with each year marked out and then he'd just use small scraps of paper with the card numbers on them for any missing players from that year.  Didn't really look good but did the job.

For me I have 33 binders for 9,700 cards.   The binders have the year/years on it 1st binder the years go from 1933 to 1990.   2007  has 2 binders.  A to P  and S to Z  (brands)

I have so many missing cards I can not have a place for each missing  one.    Some sets work great others not so good.  One set I have 3 players and there are the base,  Gold and Silver.   That set works great.  Then I have one set that has 10 players and 5 sets  (one base and 4 parallels)  That is harder.   Some sets I do let pockets Time when I'm only missing a card or two.

This is what is great about collecting you can do your own thing.

Seams like a lot of work, only to throw it away when you get the card. 

I just leave it empty. it's a lot easier to find them and slid that missing card in. 

"Seams like a lot of work, only to throw it away when you get the card."

I use junk mail/recycled paper so I don't feel so bad recycling the placeholder once I no longer need it. Otherwise, yeah, it'd be a lot of paper to use.

How do you define a player collection?  I assume it's more refined than every card since you are making place holders.

I have a few player collections and I am trying to define the scope so that I can build a collection with a reasonable chance at completion plus I don't want to chase hundreds of parallels and medium priced cards knowing I will never come close to having them all.

At the moment I have a few modern HoF players and only collect "major issues" minus RC (I don't want this in the binder w/commons) and VAR.   I have thought about only collecting the regular player card and not the AS, Highlights, CL, etc.   I like sorting them by brand so all the Topps regular cards by year.  I would put a printed card in the RC slot with small pic and other info.   I pad the end of the pages with misc cards from that brand (AS, HL, CL, etc.) as just page fillers or bonus.    I also have a back of book section of odd balls like food & retail store issues...no completeness..just opportunistic...but now I'm drifting outside of a defined collecdtion with place holders.....thus the question.