Early in highschool my friends and I decided to collect funko pops. I was the one who was the most into it, with my friends being more casual collectors. My collection only reached about 50 or so pops. After about two years of collecting i grew out of the hobby and directed myself more towards pokemon! Since then I’ve sold some of them because for what they are going for the sentimental value isn’t there for me.
I recently sold a captain rex pop for close to 500, most likely due to the release of season 7 for the clone wars along with all the covid craziness in many hobbies.
I am so excited to pump that money into my pokemon card collection, and was wondering if anyone else had similar experiences in other hobbies!
Can’t say I’ve sold things off of other collections because Pokemon cards and Pokemon in the video game are the only things I ever really collected. But cam you show a few pictures of those random Funko pops
Me too someone here has a really interesting final fantasy cards thread but I couldn’t see myself collecting the big hitters from those while always chasing something Pokemon related. Just when you think your caught up on buying Charizards there’s another one in a upcoming set which is also a big hitter haha. I only mention zards because when we collect sets the zard is usually expensive and the rest are cheap as hell compared to charizard. Assuming were not talking graded 10s. But best believe if I had stuff from another hobby id sell them for more cards. Unless we’re talking video games. Always need a few of those at least
Hot toys. That’s another new one I’ve never heard of. But ya I’ve officially been at the point where I don’t know exactly how much I’ve spent or exact number my collection is worth I just know it’s nuts on both ends. Maybe 20-22k plus spent. No idea how much they are worth besides what collection tracker shows me which doesn’t even contain all my purchases only shows the ones online. You start throwing around numbers like 50k plus and people think your extremely well off. The truth is it just casually adds up and appreciates in price. You spend $50 this day. $200 next week. $1000 a different day etc. It definitely becomes draining on the wallet and price increases don’t help you unless you sell some which defeats the purpose of collecting them if they are for a set or your own collection etc.
Yeah before i started tracking my purchases I had no idea how much I was spending. After going through my ebay and listing everything on a spreadsheet the actual figure really blew my mind! I have to update that now that I think about it
Now that we’re on the topic tho I’d like to hear some other collectables from years ago that shot up. I heard something about sealed original Disney movies in the clam shell case with some symbol i forgot what it’s called are worth a decent chunk but I never figured out if it was true or not
Can’t really relate to this personally. I mean, I have collected loads and loads of things in the past, like post stamps; minerals & fossils; pogs; euro coins; Pokémon cards; Yu-Gi-Oh cards; twisty puzzles; etc. etc. But I still have the majority of those collections in my possession and I don’t think I will sell complete collections anytime soon. Only the pogs collection I threw away when I was cleaning 10+ years ago, and still kinda regret that. And those I actually hadn’t touched for 5+ years prior.
If I were to sell for example all my twisty puzzles which I have collected between 2016 and 2019 mostly and kinda stopped since I’ve been more focused on Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh lately, I know I would definitely regret it. Having said that, I am currently downsizing my twisty puzzle collection a bit, since they take up quite a bit of space and there are some puzzles I simply don’t like to solve anyway. Although it’s not really big funds tbh. I recently bought a 2k USD card and spend about 4-5k USD on Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokémon in 2020 thus far, but the ~10 puzzles I’ve sold thus far are barely worth 350 USD (and the ones I still want to sell are the cheaper less rare ones, like 2-10 USD a piece on average). So although I am selling twisty puzzles, it’s not really to fund other collections per se, although that’s a nice bonus of course.
PS: For those wondering, this is what my twisty puzzles collection looked like in December 2018. Some puzzles have been added and removed since then, but the amount is roughly the same (~450):
Like @quuador I don’t really grow our or sell collection, however Skylanders helped me rekindle my love for Pokémon. I started collecting Skylanders back in 2013 or so and absolutely loved them. I own about 250/650 or so. To this day though they are my pride and joy because the amount I spent on them was huge amounts of money for the amount of money I was making as a kid. Now I’m an adult, have a job and spend about the same I did then but as a kid it meant so much more. The only reason I’d ever sell is if I needed to for a house for my future wife and kids however that would be one of the hardest decisions I’d ever have to make.
Wow I have never seen those. Are twisty puzzles a “thing”? Like are there rare ones, valuable ones etc or do you just collect whatever strikes you?
Personally, in my life I’ve mainly collected baseball cards, comic books, and MtG cards before pokemon. I’ve sold all of those collections, but they haven’t directly funded my pokemon hobby.
Yes to both actually. I do collect the ones I like or are interesting, or are recommended by others solving wise. I don’t really have a checklist like with Pokémon, except maybe two or three puzzles in particular on my wishlist. There are people who collect all twisty puzzles of a certain set, but I usually just buy one of those sets since solving them is rather similar.
But there are indeed some pretty rare and valuable ones. The (11 and 20-colored) Meffert’s Dogic immediately comes to mind, which is a pretty rare and desirable puzzle that sells for 1k+ USD pretty consistently (I personally have a 3D printed version since it was a lot cheaper - which usually isn’t the case for 3D printed puzzle tbh ).
From my personal collection, the Meffert’s Silver Golden Cube (signed by both the designer and manufacturer) is probably my rarest puzzle, which I bought for 400 USD a few years back, but is probably worth 500+ USD these days (I do have one more expensive puzzle which I bought for 650 USD, but that one is a 3D printed puzzle with a lot of parts, so not really rare and can still be bought: Double Circle Real 5x5x5). I could probably name a few other high-end examples that quite a few high-end twisty puzzle collectors are looking for, like the original Nintendo Crossover from 1981 or Astrolabacus from 2001, which could also reach above 1k USD on auction. Having said that, most ‘rare’ puzzles are in the 75-200 USD price range, so still reasonably affordable. And just like there are a lot of low-end Pokémon cards to collect, the same can be said for twisty puzzles. Quite a few of them are still available on twisty puzzle webshops today, like on HKNowStore.com or cubezz.com to give two examples.
Also, in the twisty puzzles community you see a clear split in two parts: collectors (like me, who prefer to collect and solve a wide variety of puzzles) and speed cubers, whom only focus on the official WCA (World Cubing Association) puzzles (11 puzzles in total) and becoming as fast as possible. The world record for the 3x3x3 single is 3.47 seconds right now, which is absolutely insane… Unfortunately there isn’t a close-up video, but to give you an idea, here is a video of the previous world record of 4.22 seconds by Feliks Zemdegs, who is probably the most well-known speedcuber worldwide who owns and breaks many world records in the different WCA events. Although personally I think average records are more impressive, since you can always get lucky during a single solve by skipping certain solve steps.
I personally can solve a regular 3x3x3 Cube in about 40 seconds on average, which sounds fast, but is pretty slow tbh. Most actual speedcubers average between 10-20 seconds for the 3x3x3 Cube after practicing about 1-1.5 years. But I’m a collector, so I prefer being able to solve and collect a lot of puzzles, instead of just the 11 WCA puzzles.
If you have any questions in particular or about what I wrote above, feel free to ask. There is also an online twisty puzzles museum that currently holds around 8,000 different twisty puzzles to give you an idea of what’s out there.
Very cool, I had no idea. Love reading about different things people collect. When my son got into legos, I also ended up buying every single series of lego minifigures. I don’t collect them per se, but still have all of them
I was hot and heavy into muscle cars from about 14 - 26 years old. I always felt out of place in that hobby, nothing before really clicked until I got back into Pokemon. Sold out and dumped the money into my collection last year. Still have a Sublime Challenger though!
Here’s some note worthy examples from over the years…
Used to play alot of MTG edh/commander, people moved away and I just lost interest. Been selling alot of my more modern cards recently as mtg is seeing similar prices increases to pokemon, cards that are due for a reprint, all time highs, etc etc. I come and go from pokemon and usally every time i step back in I pick up a few cards to add to my collection which is what I have been doing recently.
I used to be big into wetshaving. At the high point I had a little over 100 artisan shave soaps and aftershaves which was probably 15-20 years of supply. I enjoyed it at first because I was tired of spending money on cartridges and enjoyed this new method. After a while though it just became stale because the discussions devolved into “You’re stupid for liking this soap, this other brand of soap is superior”. FOMO is super strong in that hobby due to the limited production capacity of the artisans so I found myself buying things more out of fear of missing a release than actually needing or wanting to try the product. I sold 90% of my soaps/aftershaves and moved my discretionary spending back to Pokemon.
I used to play yugioh. Stopped playing a few years back as the people i met playing the game moved on and my locals closed. I have always been a sealed product collector. Pokemon was always a bit unreachable price point for me (Yes even back in like 2013/14. Back then most vintage yugioh boxes were still $75-$100 so to me pokemon boxes at $250+ seemed ridiculous and out of reach). Once i stopped playing meta yugioh, I moved most of my singles into sealed and now that sealed has greatly increased from when i acquired them, i cashed in my gains and started buying some of pokemon products I have always wanted. Still slowly acquiring items but now i have things in my collection I never thought I would be able to afford.
).
