If you don’t want to hear me ramble about my story skip down a bit…
This is my first post on E4 so I first want to start off by introducing myself a bit. I will try to keep this short and to the point as I am sure it went this way for many people. I was born in 1995 and my earliest memories of Pokémon were playing on my Gameboy color at daycare and begging my parents to buy me a pack of cards when we went to the grocery store. I remember my Dad taking me and my two brothers to go see Pokémon 2000 in theaters. I remember he kept his ancient Mew sealed and had it stashed away above the refrigerator where we couldn’t reach it. I collected cards as a kid and I remember taking my binder everywhere. I am a twin so my brother and I always had to share everything, but that meant our Pokémon collection was that much cooler haha. I remember collecting cards from base set, fossil, jungle, and rocket but I drifted away from the cards and got much more into the games. I fell in love with playing the games on my Gameboy. FR/LG was definitely my most favorite games I played (still is). My brother and I then got into collecting sports cards as well and kind of got away from collecting Pokémon (maybe we were too cool).
Fast forward to October 2020 and my love for Pokémon is still there, but mostly with the games. A good buddy of mine got me back into Pokémon cards and it reignited my love and passion for collecting the cards. I started off buy a lot of packs and ripping them with my first sets back in the hobby being champions path and vivid voltage, but then figuring out what evolutions was and going crazy for that. I ended up finding my old binders and it gave me so much nostalgia.
I would say that I have sort of an addictive personality and I just go really hard on the things I enjoy. I quickly realized that ripping packs wasn’t scratching my itch as I didn’t like really having a bunch of bulk laying around and I felt I wasn’t getting the best bang for my buck. I went heavy into researching on YouTube. Luckily, I found smpratte through another youtuber referencing how underrated his content was and now I am here.
I work in a RV factory and I wear on air pod all day and basically just listen smpratte’s patreon videos as if it were a podcast. Listening to his patreon has gotten me organically interested in a lot of the old Japanese promos as well as the high end cards. I realize that I may never own a lot of these cards, but I would love to try to get involved in them one day. I have had a lot of thoughts lately of how I can scale in the hobby. (Don’t take this as a “what should I buy” question). I just want to share with you what I am currently doing to help afford a lot of my collection goals. Some examples of things I have been doing to help scale my collection are buying multiples of new Japanese promos grading them and selling some of them off until I breakeven, at that point I can usually keep some of them for myself or to sell in the future. I have been doing this with set cards as well. For example, with the 151 set I chose some of the cards that I really like and bought multiples of them. I feel there is opportunity right when a set comes out to grade and quickly flip some of the cards. I then use this excess money, as well as income from my job, to put money into long term items that I want to hold.
So my question for you guys is…
How do you scale your collection in Pokémon? Feel free to share or not to share. I understand this isn’t always something people want to talk about, so I don’t want to force it upon anyone. I know that there are many people in this forum with much more knowledge about the hobby than myself and I just wanted to use this discussion as an opportunity to learn and also give others ideas of ways they can scale their own collection.
Another question…
I feel that staying engaged in the hobby is definitely a recipe for success. This process of buying/selling/collecting cards keeps me engaged. There are definitely times though where I tell myself I need to stop spending so I can build up my income again to buy more cards I want. What ways do you guys like to stay engaged without spending money?
I’m not sure that I fully understand the question. Are you asking how to purchase expensive cards?
There are two options:
Get paid more
Spend less + save
The first point is hard to have control over, unless you get a second job or consult or something like that. Most people purchase expensive cards in the hobby by saving up money and selling off pieces of their collection.
I would highly recommend watching the anime. It adds so much to the Pokemon TCG by allowing you to understand the “universe” in ways that the cards cannot do (for example, the personalities of Pokemon, what moves look like, backstories on characters, etc.).
I would also recommend going to local trade nights to meet other collectors and trade. It’s the most organic way to engage in the hobby without spending money per se.
Hmm, this will vary for a lot of people based off collecting goals, income, plan to re-sell or not, etc. Personally I’ve changed how I “scale” or approach things a lot since I started. For example, with slabs I used to focus on higher grades more often than not, but I started building up raw binder sets and have been buying a lot of lower grade slabs to purposely break out of the slab for my binder sets or seeking out raw NM copies instead. I want to add that I have nothing against slabs or grading, but I personally like having a mix of slabs & NM ungraded cards in my collection.
The main reason I’ve been doing this is due to collection goals which I have many and also to save space/costs. I can get a lot more cards when I focus on NM copies as opposed to high grade slabs, so the high grade slabs are usually my favourite cards that I want in a slab. When I started, I was heavily focused on English WOTC/vintage era cards. I’ve hit a lot of the milestones for that and have shifted focus more into Japanese cards (modern & vintage) the past while and even exploring some other sets I didn’t experience as much in my childhood (E-Reader sets and beyond).
I would personally map out your short and longer term goals to help budget better and build your collection most efficiently. You can save a lot of money by taking your time and making some small compromises along the way and I think you’ll get more satisfaction out of it too. Another thing is to try and not FOMO or panic or get too influenced by social media or YouTube. If you’re just collecting regular set cards, you’ll most likely find another copy very soon, so it’s worth taking your time as much as you can.
You’re right, I probably do need to define some of my goals. I feel like I just go all over the place lol. When I see value it’s so hard to not just buy it. I currently have binders that I need to finish of cardass, vending, and VS series. The first binder I did finish that I really wanted to do was all WOTC black star promos. I really like a lot of the old Japanese promos. It seems like at this moment I have an assortment of just cards I really like in slabs. When I was going through my binder that I had as a kid I found a yellow cheeks E3 Pikachu and after doing research I found out about the red cheeks E3 Pikachu so I had to buy that as well lol.
Welcome to E4 @rzelm, hope you enjoy your time here. I think about scale in two different ways 1. Number/variety of cards that I own and 2. Total value of my collection. When I got back into the hobby I only had a handful of WOTC cards so in order to scale “horizontally” and collect all the sets I wanted, I realized buying all PSA 10’s was handcuffing me. As @jabby has pointed out many times, you can gain significantly more ground “horizontally” by buying raw NM cards instead of PSA 10 slabs. Trading a (subjectively) small difference in quality of the card could maximize the number of cards and value. The premium between PSA 9 and 10 set cards alone can be 10X in many cases.
In regards to value, the second way I scale is by focusing more energy on a handful of higher value cards. This allows me to stay focused on few specific cards instead of constantly searching/ordering/opening packages for cards that may only meet short term goals. For example if your budget allows for $200 a month, you could purchase one $2,400 card a year, or five $480 cards a year etc. My goal here is to buy cards that are highly coveted, supply constrained, trophy/promo cards etc. that I believe will have better long term value and growth than a typical set card in “perfect” condition.
Both 1. and 2. can be in direct conflict with each other, but can be easily moderated depending on your collection goals. For example, many people focus on 1. first to collect all the sets they want. Once their collection reaches critical mass, they start focusing on 2.
I’ve always subscribed to the old adage, “Collect what you love”. That helps reduce FOMO with new sets and helps you pinpoint where to spend your expendable income. Scaling can come in the form of more cards you actually like rather than buying a bunch of cards that you think could be profitable in the future.
To stay engaged in the community without spending money, E4 and the discord server are amazing as well as Instagram. I can’t tell you how many awesome people I’ve met just through random DM’s on IG.
I consider my scollection big, however, I do not have the valuable cards that many others do. I have never REALLY stopped collecting for too long, but I never had much capitol until only the last few years. However, I’ve been aware of the upper end cards for a long time, and I know where my collection sits compared to others, so it’s a small, but broad collection with some very nice quality in it.
If I saw it listed properly somewhere, I’d rate it as “promising”.
I also want to stop spending… So many good scalable deals tho. Anyway, setting goals and sticking to them is the best way to accomplish larger things.
I very much appreciate your response and how thorough you were. I have completed one of the binders that I wanted which was the WOTC black star promos. I have some sets I still want to complete, but I feel the hobby moves so fast now and I’m trying to put a lot of my capital into cards/boxes that I see a lot of value in. Things that I can resell in the next 3-5 years. I like what you said about “horizontal” scaling.
One thing I’m trying with the new 151 set is I bought about 5 of each starter, Mewtwo, Pikachu, and the Snorlax because I really like these cards. I’m going to grade them and sell some of them and try to get a couple of them “basically free.” If that makes sense lol.
That’s where I’m at right now too. I am like “okay I’m gonna take a break from spending” and then I just see something that looks scalable and I can’t help myself lol. I also work a pretty mind numbing job. It’s physical labor but I could do it with my eyes closed at this point so that’s where Patreon comes in and it keeps me going. I’ve also heard your name on there quite a bit “steelix backwards.” Do you have a collection thread?
No problem. For me it’s pretty easy to get side tracked so I try and work on 1 or 2 goals at a time and complete them before I get distracted with 151, Kusajima cards, VS or Vending and all the other ones that come after.
Yes! I try to have a bigger goal, such as right now, I want to finally add some CD promos to my books, and a goal with smaller steps, like the Harada collection I’m starting. And various but not so many that I’m always buying for them, other artist collections: about 4 total.
I do this with life too. Get a new job, gain about 10 lbs of muscle this summer.
Hi and welcome! I really understand your struggle as a broke fellow collector. I’m still at uni, never had a real income since the majority of my money goes in rent/public transportation/student fees and can’t really do some full time job.
If I had to say my spendable “income” right I would say 20 eur/month lol, so it can also happen that I need to stay months without buy anything because simply I can’t afford a low end billion printed holo.
But here I am, enjoying this beautiful hobby with many knowledgeable people, geeking on cool pokemon arts, discussing the history and background of the tcg, finding new ways to organize my binder and so on.
I would say that actually owning the items and buying is like 40-50% of the hobby, it’s perfectly ok to stop some months (in order to save some money for the card that you really really want) and engaging in these other activities.
For real high end card you can always go for a lower grade (it could be so satisfying to still owning a piece of history), or buy only your favorite ones.
I understand the PSA9-10 culture but, so many times it’s just FOMO or an unhealthy way to compare to others.
Building a valuable collection requires many many years for the majority of people, don’t be afraid of that, embrace this long journey one PSA case at the time (or one binder page at the time). You have to follow your own path at your speed, trying also to reduce the social/YouTube/online content that you are consuming (trust me, I’ve seen other E4 members struggling with this addictive behavior).
Like wise members say, there will always be another set card, don’t be in rush. We survived the covid crazy prices it can’t go worse. Hope this wall of text helps, and good luck!
