I went all in on booster packs rather than cards after watching how many were being ripped. They are finite and I wanted to preserve the history since few have done so with such detail.
It is an absolutely insane rabbit hole if you try to collect them all across all languages. I spent 2-3 years researching Base set and have settled on around 35 variants. Many didn’t even have photographs online so I hypothesized they existed and trolled eBay until they appeared.