I think my biggest mistake was to buy based on what other people like, versus what I personally want in my collection. Assuming with a finite budget, you should always just buy cards you enjoy than to follow the hype train and grab cards that other people may have preference for .
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Obviously yes:
-kept buying commons of plentiful sets, saving the holos and pricey cards for later (rookie mistake)
-severely compromising on card quality, thinking that I would be ok with cards folded in half lol (a mix of FOMO and inexperience)
-overpaid during covid, knowing that what I was buying wasn’t rare at all
-not having a clear purpose when buying: some time ago I bought 200$ of mtg cards that were really low priority for me.
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I way, wayyyyy overpaid when I was starting out 
I think it was a combination of not knowing what I was doing and FOMO. I collect mostly WOTC and had no grasp at first how common even the “rare” cards are.
“A PSA 9 1st Edition Giovanni’s Gyarados?! I’d better buy this now because I may never have this opportunity again!!” 
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For me personally, anytime I’ve ever lost money or overspent I never feel too bad about it. Overtime I learned that you’ll have great buys, poor buys, and speculative buys where it’s hard to determine a price.
If you stick with a hobby long enough, you’ll have your wins and losses. There’s a good chance your wins will offset your losses as you gain more and more experience.
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Once bought an anniversary card for a friend’s birthday.
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I have made a mistake and have been memed on e4 for the past 2 years 
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I think I have at times at least overpaid on some cards, especially certain slabs. Raw cards I’ve done much better with financial gains through some sheer luck when buying as they turned out better conditioned than I anticipated for the price paid.
Also definitely overpaid on some sets I’ve tried collecting (i.e. WOTC Gym series) and others I thought were ‘undervalued’, but simply didn’t understand them fully.
With this said, even with my losses factored in, I’ve greatly made up for it with future purchases once I learned and made those mistakes at least. You win some and you lose some, but it’s best to remain positive and look ahead to the future and just enjoy your collection as you go.
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what mistake did you make? Don’t have to answer if you don’t want to talk about it
After I realized that collecting EN cards in Japan was a mistake I continued to blunder on:
- Paid $15 more than MSRP on newly released sealed products
- Paying a penny per card on bulk commons thinking that I could resale them for profit at my local card shop
- Overcollecting sealed product on bad sets and cluttering my home
After making so many mistakes I gave up for a month around Christmastime. Later Youtube recommended the smpratte videos to me and those helped to put me on the right track. Really helped me get an idea of how the whole TCG ecosystem works and gave me ideas to find my niche as a collector
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so you stopped collecting english cards in Japan?
Yea I thought they were cheap because there wasn’t much interest in a language that few can read, but the reality is that 95% of English cards here are fake
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My biggest mistakes will always be not buying cards or choosing wrong among several rare items that show up at the same time.
It can be difficult to optimize my dollars when most of the cards on my wishlist are listed sporadically. I will only know if I made the right decision in the future when I look back. Hindsight is always 20/20 in collecting. 
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on PWCC weekly auctions, I made a max bid thinking I was bidding on a PSA 10 copy. It was a PSA 9 copy. You cannot retract your max bid even if it is much higher than current bid. Lesson learned
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I may or not have bought a Flareon Legendary collection psa 9 instead of the jungle one, but not a bad problem to have.
After reading the thread, I would have been stupid not to buy it, right!?
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When first getting into old Japanese Cards and really starting to learn about them I Fomo’ed so much thinking it’d be the last time I’d ever see them
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