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. Questionsj 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.
When to decide to sell extras (cards you bought doubles of by accident, cards you upgraded) to reinvest the earnings into other collection goals is always a hard one for me. In the past I always liquidated hobby items when times were rough. I considered selling a big chunk of my ‘spares and doubles’ box this summer but decided that is was not needed or the time yet; they could go up in price/wrong moment to sell. But on the flip-side; when times really get rough I tend to sell for a lower price to get the money in quickly.
I feel like a broken record at this point: the worst thing by far about Pok..oh fuck it, you know how it goes.
I’m going to answer this as if we’re still in the dark ages, since there’s no point in answering about 2026.
CUSTOMS! Taking a 25%++ hit is bad enough, but there is the slight off-chance that they will open the booster box. Never had it happen, it’s not really supposed to happen, but it could.
Cards you can’t pull! Which means you have to deal with the nightmare that has become ubiquitous now, third-party condition assessments.
People who only want to trade! They have the good stuff, but they don’t want your money, they want your french booster boxes or your much more expensive something.
People with terrible english! Potentially problematic during negotiations.
Selling raw is such a grind, even just organizing it! I have some in storage from when I started almost 20 years ago. I don’t know how people do it without hiring employees.
Listing cards on eBay, inputting cards into PSA for submissions, talking to people in - person at conventions who don’t understand why you won’t haggle down to 70% of your listed price
Look, i understand base set holo shifts are hard to find but why wont you trade it for an evolving skies etb with an upside down slipcover? You dont understand the value of something rare like that.
Selling in general. Especially when there is a scratch or something on a sealed item. Communicating with someone for days, only to see them withdraw in the last seconds because of this.
There’s only one true answer. Sifting thru 99% garbage on ebay for any single card. Absolute potato photos in a dark room white background taken from 10 feet away.
I didn’t buy a card last year and I went to buy a few singles in the last 2 weeks and was reminded this gets worse and worse every time. Not to mention now that prices are sky high you’re dealing with the tedium of having already overpriced heavily played cards stacking the bottom of the search so you wind up spending ungodly amounts of time just finding a $5-20 card. In the old days you’d find it in a few mins.
I’m collecting for over ten years now, but during those ten years I’ve almost solely bought cards, and barely sold. Heck, I maybe sold 25-30 cards on average each year during those ten years (and apart from an obvious outliner, not even high value stuff), yet have over 24k more cards than when I started. I even have my eBay account to prove it: 1.7k positive feedback, with 0 sales.
I’m defintely in the minority here, but due to almost no other expenses (before I started living on my own), I could get by with just my job, without the need to sell other stuff first in order to continue buying. Unfortunately, I kinda reached that point, yet it is so boring and tedious to try and sell 10k+ duplicated stuff, 99% of it being bulk, so I’m completely unmotivated to do so..
I’m glad I’m not the only one who thinks selling is annoying, based on the comments above. Although it defintely doesn’t motivate me to try harder, haha.
The whole hobby is technically avoidable one thing you can’t ever avoid is people you disagree with regardless of what you are doing, when you are, and who you are. Someone will disagree with you.
I feel you man. The trick is to not think at all. Just list, communicate, sell, don´t sell. Easier said than done, but still. But I often just stop trying to sell for a week or so because I´m just done with it haha. I never sell individual bulk btw, for this reason. Too lazy.
This is why there is an argument to be made that avoiding people is one of the best ways to live (there are people that really preach this, one of which was Rousseau). It is kind of boring though.
oh man, im right there with you. It took me time to figure out ways to sort cards. But the REAL ticket, is a system where you don’t even need to let cards pile up. You have a spot for anything you buy or open. And you dang well put it there NOW. Having a place for things before they pile up is the way. Part of my 2026 goals was to refine my organization and get rid of some more of my various odds and ends of bulk. And I’m working on it.
Likewise opening packs and being careful to not turn it into a pile is good. I began to open packs with a sorting tray at hand. The holos of various rarities can that way get pre-sorted as I open packs. Though opening packs has been out of the question for 1 year+ at this point. Thought I’d share my opening method. Makes clean up easy and stop piles of cards from eating the house.
I see a lot of people talking about how tedious selling is, but I think buying is even worse. Since I buy from Spain, I usually use Cardmarket, and I spend hours and hours going through dozens of sellers, always trying to line up purchases so you don’t overpay on shipping.
I don’t ever want to let go.
