Hey everyone - I’ve been posting on here for over a year but never got around to making a collection thread.
I started collecting during the Pokemon craze in the '90s, fizzled out over the course of gen 3, pretty much missed DP/BW entirely, and only got fully back into cards again starting with the Generations set.
I don’t really collect any PSA-graded cards. I totally understand the appeal, but personally I prefer the freedom of leaving them ungraded - the idea that I could do whatever I want with them: build a deck, arrange them in a binder, feel the texture on a full art or something. Plus it saves money of course. So I’m mostly a binder collector who looks for ungraded cards in near mint to mint condition.
My main focus lately has been Sun and Moon sets. I’ve been buying booster boxes and selling my duplicates to make some money back, and it’s actually going pretty well. This focus on the business side of things rather than collecting is also why I’ve been mostly absent from here lately, but I’m trying to balance them both going forward.
My SM secret rares so far:
I also collect some WotC sets, mostly base through Neo, although I haven’t added anything in a while. These are the exception to my “near mint or better” rule, since I’ve had most of them since I was a kid, and as a kid I was known to stuff 10 cards in a single binder slot or shuffle them like a deck of playing cards.
I really like the niche print runs too, especially 4th print base and 3rd print fossil, so I have a handful of each. I also have some shadowless cards, including a Charizard I pulled from one of my first booster packs back in 1999, which is unfortunately in considerably worse condition than the picture makes it look:
And when I come across a card that I absolutely love, sometimes I’ll start collecting multiple editions of it - so far my most complete collection like this is Flareon EX from Generations, which has the cutest art ever:
I also started an Alolan Vulpix collection recently. I’ve noticed that several people on here collect all cards of a certain species, and I’ve always thought it was a cool idea. Alolan Vulpix has quickly become one of my favorites (and doesn’t have 20 years’ worth of prior cards to collect) so I went with that one. Here’s what I have so far:
I’ll try to keep this thread updated once in a while with anything cool I pick up in the future. Thanks for reading!