After reading the recent thread on WHAT people collect, I’m curious HOW do people go about collecting those items? Do you first collect all the holos? Do you collect in a random order as you find cards in your desired set become available? Do you start with the most expensive card?
I came to my own realization recently and changed strategy to start with the most expensive cards in a set that I want(assuming I can even find them for sale). After that, I’ll work my way down the value chain or even just grab what I can find available.
I usually target whatever cards are most expensive and go from there. Those are the ones that are most in demand and therefore most susceptible to price hikes. Otherwise, it’s a matter of researching the market and seeing what I’m comfortable paying. I also try and target cards that don’t come up often and buy them asap. I personally don’t mind paying above market/setting new highs since I’d rather secure the card than haggle over the last 5-10%.
I think that’s the norm for most people though, open to seeing what everyone else does.
Over the past few years of price rises it has become abundantly clear to me that regardless of what your goal is, collecting the most expensive cards and/or rarest / low pop first is the best way to go.
Three personal examples:
WOTC:
I am missing around a dozen cards from my WOTC 1st Ed binder sets. Most of these are unfortunately base holos. While I always expected these to be pricy, the costs were relatively flat for years, so I just picked up particularly strong 8s and occasional 9s for my set. I knew I would eventually have to go for the Charizard, but I figured I could wait for a strong 8 to come on the market at around 2.5-3k or a 9 for 4.5-6k. Basically I had other priorities and fell into the fallacy that because base 8s and 9s had been stagnant for years, I had more time to pick them up. Of course this year has proven that to be false. I ended up paying more for a Charizard 8 I am very happy to than I had ever planned to spend on a 9.
EX/LV X
Again, these are cards I picked up over the years whenever I saw a good deal. I made a full list of everything I needed so if I happened to see something at a good price I’d buy it. But I never explicitly searched eBay for all the cards I needed and purchased them. This will cost me thousands of dollars more now to complete a full ex binder set. For lv x it is worse… Ex I had personally considered undervalued and at least did pick up most. But lv x I figured I had YEARS to get them all. Just shows that the market doesn’t care about your collecting time line! I had been considering going for a psa 10 EX set and gave it up for all but my favorite ex cards.
Chanseys:
Where to begin… Very grateful to have the Chanseys I do… But at this point I have basically given up on Base 1st Ed and Shadowless 10. Even if I could find a 1st Ed 10 I was happy with, it’s no longer worth the current price to me personally as a PSA 10 Chansey master set will likely always be impossible. There were several times around 2016-18 I considered getting a 1st Ed 10 around $4-5k, multiple were listed at pwcc in this time frame. IIRC one auction block had two! Here again I misdiagnosed the reality at hand and because I consistently saw them for sale I assumed I could pick one up fairly easy.
As for Shadowless, I missed the boat plain and simple by not going all in from the very beginning start of my Chansey collection, c’est la vie and best of luck to all the Shadowless 10 set collectors.
Great topic! My collecting strategy varies based on the eventual goal and how important it is to me. I have a couple big goals I’ve pursued in my time collecting and my strategy has always been to buy/grade the biggest cards first. It’s worked out for me so far but I benefitted from many of those “big cards” being relatively attainable given my financial situation at the time and the card prices. This is not the strategy for all my goals, many of my smaller goals are just sets that I like collecting on the side, so I buy/grade those cards as I see them and there isn’t a set strategy there.
I’ve actually modified my goals and strategies a lot recently with the price rises. My strategy of buying the big cards first has become a lot harder, only one year ago the biggest cards I could buy for my goals were like $500-600, now they’re $3000+. The prices have far outpaced my saving ability, so if I stuck with that strategy I’d just be holding money as all cards go up and out of my reach. I adjusted my strategy to go after lower-importance cards and lesser grades and it’s proven to be a very good decision.
Basically, I think your collecting strategy is a very individual thing informed by the nature of your goals, the amount of money you’re willing/able to spend, and whether or not you foresee any major price changes that spur you to obtain cards quicker/slower.
Well said. This is exactly how I am feeling after thinking about it. I would much rather pay the expensive price of a few, hard to get cards in the present, then I would wait to see how much they might rise in the future compared to less desired cards that might all gain in value, but probably not at the rate of those in demand/ chase cards. I didn’t want to get to the end of my collection goal and be scratching my head missing the top items when I already spent all that effort on the less valuable/ more available cards first.
I just scroll through eBay every now and then and think ‘that looks nice’ and add it to gixen, then sometimes I wakeup and I have a bunch of invoices to pay.
I don’t feel like I had a “strategy” up until about 10 years ago. As a kid, I collected willy-nilly, traded cards here and there. After getting my 5th Gyarados card, I effectively forgot about Pokemon for a while and focused on Yugioh until I sold almost everything by the time I went to college.
College is where my collection started to really take place. At first it was just catching up with previous sets and paying for the small-fries or adding to my non-TCG collection. When I was able to get a better job and save more, I then started focusing more on the hard-to-get cards. As long as the front looked decent, I would buy it. After I got my big wants out of the way, I would do daily searches on various sites (primarily Ebay & Yahoo Japan) to get the rest.
Getting the most expensive wants out of the way definitely seems to be the best strategy. Now that I’ve almost completed my collection, I’ve been trying to purchase replacements for some of my cards which has been very difficult to near impossible.
Above all else, what I think has benefited me the most is this community and the connections I’ve made. I have at least one card from every set that was either gifted/sold/or brought to my attention because of another member here.
When I first got back into collecting I was so excited I made a 10-20 page list of cards I want. I had the idea to collect what I like best from each era and set. I noticed the huge price differences between ungraded to PSA 9 or 10. I decided to handle the massive list on a budget the only way that would become a reality if I went for all ungraded cards. I told myself these cards are 20 plus years old so a little whitening doesn’t hurt as long as it’s not continuous whitening. I started collecting modern sets in mint condition but older ones in light played to near mint. I originally collected set by set. But i adjusted to start buying my favorites first from each era as a whole then complete them all. I managed to dodge most of the price increases besides a few cards I missed my opportunity on. (Steelix ex, and Luxray level X keep I’ll using me at prices I’m comfortable with.) Overall I’m very happy to own as much as I do. I’ve hated the fact I’ve spent so much all together but now I appreciate it more because I realized if i bought slower I would have missed plenty of cards I wanted for my collection! Edit: Side note I did have to skip some sets along the way due to price point and current budgets but I’ll go back for them eventually! (1st edition Base, Skyrige Holo’s, Gold Stars, Ex Team Rocket Returns Ex’s, Plasma Storm Zard)
Your strategy should depend on what you think will happen in the market. If you feel the market will retrace going after the most expensive items could be a mistake. Although it can be risky to wait on some of the rarest, scarcest and most in demand items financially it can be the right move. I myself don’t intentionally go after the most expensive or the least expensive first, I go after what I personally think is undervalued at any given moment. Because my collecting interests are broad, I like cards from all eras in English and Japanese, and plan to collect for many years, this works for me. As soon as I think a specific set or card gets too hot and hyped up I simply move onto another collecting goal that I think most people aren’t working on with the intention of eventually circling back. This has worked very well for me so far
@jacobm9 I understand your logic but that strategy doesn’t work for me at all personally. To me literally every card is undervalued. From base to sword and shield. Doesn’t matter the era. I go off pack price and pull rate. If a pack is worth let’s say $500. Any holo from the set should be worth $500-$1500 plus. 1 in 3 chance of getting a Holo. That’s just a random example but most cards are far cheaper then cost of a few packs. Not to mention the harder pull rate cards where it takes multiple booster boxes to even have a shot. Just my opinion. Plus completing goals is very rewarding
Fair point about going after what’s undervalued! I did something similar recently with a card that I noticed wasn’t expensive but happened to rarely appear for sale. As far as expecting or hoping for a retrace I don’t think too hard about that for now. My expectation is that in the long run(10+ years) it will be valued above the price I currently paid and if it drops before then maybe I’ll even get another copy of the card!
@greenpotatoes, for me, I try to think about what I want instead of getting pressured into a goal. For example, I just wanted a nice 1st edition base set blastoise, so I got one in PSA 8. Part of me was really pressured into getting a PSA 10, after watching a ton of videos and reading posts on this forum. But at the end of the day, I just wanted something in acceptable/near mint condition, so I got the 8.
Expensive stuff is always first, but it’s also more of the things that are harder to find. For my blastoise evolution line collection, there are some japanese promos that are a little trickier to find so I hunted those first.
I’ve also deviated from the graded path to just go for ungraded for now. I personally do not believe in the price differential that grading gives as a collector, and I will only go for graded stuff if the value of the underlying is too high and I need some type of verification. This is also why I do a mix of Japanese and English, because Japanese counterfeits are tougher to do (although this could be only true for MTG). I do plan on grading some cards, but those are purely to sell because it doesn’t fit within my collection.
I really like @qwachansey’s post. Also, for @hisoka107’s strategy, maybe we can stay tuned to his youtube channel?
My strategy has always been buy what you love and want to own. Luckily for me that includes Charizard at the top of my list so i’ve done well from a current money perspective but regardless if Charizard is worth a lot or a little I will still keep it in my collection.
This is literally me lol. I’m working on every set from Base through Power Keepers. And while I’ve only 100% completed 9 or 10 sets, I’m anywhere from 50% to 90% done with most of the rest of them. It’s kind of annoying to have a bunch of incomplete sets, but it’s very price effective if you know that you’re ultimately going to be completing all of them. This is what I’d recommend to people with very broad collecting goals – basically just pick up deals on cards you need whenever you find them (especially via auction, which can yield some pretty great deals for lower-demand cards).
Another separate recommendation I have for collecting binder sets is, if you’re only looking for NM cards, purchase PSA 8s and crack them. They’re the pretty much the same price as raw NM for most cards and they’re much more reliable (for newer certs) condition-wise. They almost always have great-looking fronts, too. At this point, I’m getting pretty close to 100 opened so far, and I’ve never accidentally damaged a card. The PSA 8 strategy is especially good for collecting WotC 1st edition sets, since auctions for NM raw holos typically go higher than PSA 8 prices lol, and there are tons of PSA 8s floating around on eBay.
When I first started my goal was a shadowless set in psa 10, with the exception of charizard and blastoise as 9’s only. I got like 1/6th of the way done and stopped. Then it was buying sealed to sell later, now its back to buying psa cards for my collection.
Edit: Side note I did have to skip some sets along the way due to price point and current budgets but I’ll go back for them eventually! (1st edition Base, Skyrige Holo’s, Gold Stars, Ex Team Rocket Returns Ex’s, Plasma Storm Zard)