The Question of the Day is a way to facilitate community discussion to help members ponder the unanswered questions of the world that are somehow relating to the hobby. Questions are many times open ended and up to interpretation. Feel free to post your thoughts in as much or as little detail as you’d like.
Helpful Considerations may or may not help some people focus their answer, these are blurred to not bother those who have their own ideas.
I honestly don’t think that I would change anything all the mistakes I’ve made have been good for me
for example when I was in 4th grade and I traded my mew promo for four common cards and got depressed afterwards because I realized that I really liked that card and the commons I traded for were garbage this led me to getting interested in older cards that I already had leading me to do research and start to expand my collection to include cards that I still have to this day. If I never traded that mew I probably wouldn’t have ever gotten farther into Pokemon till much later and missed out on so many memories so realistically.
Also if I go back and change stuff in the past I might not meet and interact with some of the people who have helped me decide who I want to be and how I want to interact with this hobby and then I might turn into a r/pokeinvesting person who has not compassion for the hobby gives me the creeps just thinking about it
I think the only thing that I would do is go back in time a couple years and tell my slightly younger self to get off of youtube because I can only find so much information about the hobby there and to come find more parts of the internet that have information like here and to go outside and talk to more people who are also in the hobby.
I would also tell my younger self to stop bringing up Pokemon as a hobby whenever introducing myself nobody in 2015 thought it was cool outside of other nerds of course
Go back in time from when I was a wee lad and beat myself up for bringing my Japanese Jungle Eevee to school where it got stolen and for spilling berry juice on my Black Star Promo Moltres where it then got stuck on another card and I had to peel it off, therefore ripping off all but Moltres’s beak and the text Could have gotten them graded if I wasn’t treating my cards like crap growing up
I like your optimism regarding mistakes but this one is too real lol
I would immediately go back in time and tell my mom “NO!!!” when she asks if she can sell my Pokemon stuff from my childhood during the neighborhood yard sales. Worst Pokemon related decision I ever made, I would love to have all of my childhood stuff back.
My initial reaction was to keep my childhood collection which is long gone. But after a bit of thought, I think I would rather have gotten back into things in 2016 when I picked up Pokémon GO instead of 2021 with Celebrations coming out. A few years of pre-covid collecting would’ve gotten me farther than my childhood collection.
I would probably ask my past collector self to just relax and do not rush in trying to complete collection goals. Be more at peace with the hobby and enjoy the smaller, finer things more than just trying to complete checklists.
I also took my childhood binder to a worksite with my dad, forgot it there, and couldn’t get it back. I’d love to have not done that. I have no idea what all cards I lost, which is probably for the best, but I still remember a few - Yuka Morii’s Bellossom is one that’s still extremely nostalgic to me. I remember finding it extra cool because it had a championship deck back.
I think my biggest mistake was not restarting collecting earlier. During the Pokemon GO hype I got the itch and vividly remember looking up a base set booster box on eBay but the prices scared me away. Money aside, I regret missing the opportunity to experience collecting in a more “calm” era.
Don’t have any huge decision regrets. I’d like not to have sold my Mario and Luigi Pikachu boxes but I needed the money at the time.
I guess the only thing would be to go back and tell little me to skip the Yu-Gi-Oh phase and stick with Pokémon cards. When EX Ruby&Sapphire came out I was unhappy with how differently the card layout was from the WOTC era, which started my break from Pokémon cards until around 2011 - and I missed some really cool stuff in there!
I regret being too preoccupied with english xy/sm to worry about any japanese promos like the ponchos and whatnot
also selling my mega rays a few years back
I was personally holding a PSA 8 1st edition Charizard in 2019 for 2.5k and decided to pass. The card itself was not really one of my goals but the value it has today would help me finish my collection.
Oh easy. I sold all my cards off somewhere around 2004/5 and got around £90 after fees/postage. Even then the estimates were around £1,000 value for my stuff. They did pay for a very very good night out though during my Uni days so it’s not all bad.
I’m not going to pretend they were all PSA 10 because they would not have been but I had plenty of great early cards, I had stacks and stacks of Topps which seem to be slowly increasing today.
But like most stonk level increases, I know full well I’d have sold them way before the peak. The second those cards were showing a value increase I’d have had them on ebay.
And 2025 Kijamon is Intersteallring behind the bookcase screaming noooooo!
Could have gotten them graded if I wasn’t treating my cards like crap growing up