Just a personal rant.
Im steadily chugging along on my English retail deck collection, feeling pretty good about it, been upgrading opened decks to sealed decks pretty regularly, been picking up some rarer collection boxes, its all good right?
No! I see someone post a “complete” deck collection on ebay with variants and I notice that theres a different variant on the fossil decks without damage counter stones shown on the box. Well, Id never seen that before but sure enough, about 1 of every 5-10 boxes on ebay are that variant, sure I can splurge a little and grab them now since the price is jumping. Alright, looking good now… but wait, I check the barcodes on a couple base 2 decks… drat! Theres a variation on the barcode number that I had assumed would be there but actually found more copies this time for all the decks in base 2.
I begin a more detailed search on alternate barcodes again and find that from Base starter deck to before Neo has a total of 75 individual decks with box variations that I know of so far (not including giftbox or deluxe collections), not just the 20 different decks. I have an assumption that on top of that, there are not 18 different decks for Neo to Sandstorm (all are still using the rectangle deck box style so i count them together), but theres a high chance of there being 26 or more individual deck boxes with variants. I havent even tried confirming how many ex series alternates there are yet but I know that at least 6 of the 14 sets have a variant box of each deck.
That puts total likely theme deck boxes with variations at least at 300 from base to the newest V Battle decks, not including any trainer kits, collections, battle arena decks, etc (about another 75 different products with decks at least, but forget getting all variations because many older collection boxes can have 1 to 6 different deck variations packaged).
I thought I was close to the finish line and now Im back down a couple dozen decks, still not including collection boxes that rarely ever show up. The unique weirdness to it is that it isnt new stuff that is hard to find, its all the old stuff that theres very little information about because nobody cared about it and theres no records why they made so many different boxes. And who knows if I even know of them all, it seems like theres constantly more coming out of the woodwork that I hadnt seen before.
The frustration of being close and then the goal moving further is real. Of course, its part of the card hunt and the collecting and I love my collections, but its so freaking annoying.
Once I have time, I’ll probably have to do a resource article showing all the different variations of everything, at least for the early sets.
Rant over.
Anyone else ever start a collection and then continue to find more and more that is part of it?
