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.
Today’s Question: QotD: Forget that it isnt polite, what is the proper way to gloat about your collection that reflects its amazingness?
Helpful considerations: Trumpets and fanfare? A theme song sung by Jason Paige? Powerpoint presentation? An impressive spreadsheet with several tables and charts? Comparisons to other equally rare items in the world?
A banner and confetti would do wonders for everytime I reveal my collections amazingness. Excuse me for gloating about my collection for a moment, it isnt the most impressive collection of cards but I havent seen or heard of anyone with an equal or better deck collection currently, although if they are out there I’d like to know. 99% of all theme deck boxes ever released and even a large portion of known products that include decks. Everything included from rare box variants, decks that havent popped up sealed in years, and rare demo decks that never had much information released. Not only that but my collection is over 90% sealed. Several years worth of dedicated researching to find differences that have never been documented, not even on E4! So an award to recognize it, a banner, a small pop of confetti everytime I introduce my collection would probably be the proper way to get into speaking about it.
At New Year’s I asked my wife’s (very drunk) uncle if he would like to see my spreadsheets. To my credit, one of his hobbies is spreadsheeting, so this wasn’t that weird, but the conversation went something like:
“And if I input a check here, then-“
“Wait is this all conditionally formatted?”
“Yeah, this is all conditionally formatted!”
“No way!”
“The sheet data is linked across these three books too.”
“IT’S ALL LINKED??? HOLY-“
It was glorious. He doesn’t really know what Pokémon is, but he was very impressed at my data keeping and how many check marks there were. So probably that.
Im opposite, into pokemon but not as much knowledge of proper spreadsheeting. Can you briefly explain why my mind should be blown by this so that it can properly be blown by this?
Conditional formatting refers to telling the cells “when this thing is in the box, make it look different.” This difference could be text color, cell color, font, text size, bold/underline/italic, whatever. In the case of my sheet, when you put a check mark in the box, the text changes to black and the cell color turns blue. When a period is in the box, the text turns white (so it looks like nothing is there- important for later, stay with me).
This isn’t all that hard to figure out necessarily, but it does require extra detail and makes updating the sheet so much smoother when you don’t have to change cell settings every time.
I also have all of the cell in my sheet auto-count themselves based on a period (cards I don’t have) or a check mark (cards I do have), which is displayed as a bar graph and percentage on my main page. This requires a little more knowledge of formulas and how everything works together.
Finally, data from my main pages is linked to my supplementary pages. The main pages have everything sorted chronologically by set, but since that’s a little hard to parse when I don’t know what illustration I’m looking for, I created supplemental pages with cards organized by illustration. Linking the data allows me to check a box on my main sheet, and it will auto-update on my supplemental pages, giving it a check as well. These are also conditionally formatted.
Every year PSA selects a set from each card category from Set Registry which they think is the most awesome set done in the past year. Apparently they didn’t expect someone would be mad enough to get all the S-Ps so they selected the set as the best Pokémon set of the year and sent the madman a trophy.
TBH it’s not as amazing as some the great sets selected in previous years but hey I’ll take the trophy since they offered one.
I have recently been updating my collection thread (so please check it out!) and enjoy just posting scans. That’s enough gloating from me although, I am extremely proud of my collection. I wouldn’t really think of doing anything different.
Normies can only dream of putting together the kind of collection that I have, or have the experiences I’ve had. And unlike them, who were too cool for school back when the hahbee was worth participating in, there wasn’t any “I’m not investing, I actually love Pokeman”-cognitive dissonance whilst paying in kidneys and whatever is left after alimony for near mint garbage to some cryptonian trucel on Loyalfans.
“LmAo pAcK frEsh dOesN’t MeaN aNytHing” from people who have to scavenge binders for booger-free cards and treadmill submissions to get the 7.5’s that they flex in their facebook groups, “japanese quality oink oink” from people who joined the hahbee 21 days ago and can’t afford the english cards they really want.
English set cards from the golden era are the meat and potatoes of the hahbee, they do not grasp at distinction, they are the jewels of the hahbee, they are historic, unlike some random sweaty tournament with liMitEd meme exeggutor and Ronald imakuniDonald that all of 34 attendants remember.
Depending on your collection, while you may be proud of your journey and what you have, it may not be polite to gloat about it to the degree it deserves. It is nice that some people collect sets of modern in psa10 but they may not fully understand the challenges and difficulties of Rabby250’s all s-p japanese promos in psa10. Or how some collections have taken tens of thousands of dollars and are so low pop that they they cannot be replicated. I believe that is something that should be met with an appropriate fanfare, such as everyone bowing before you when you show it, which would probably not be the politest thing if you were to inform people “Excuse me, this collection is amazing and the only one of them there will ever be, please bow before its glory”.
Of course not all collections are that amazing but maybe completing a goal should at least get a round of applause for your efforts.
So what do you think is the proper level of respect that your efforts in collecting deserve from others when looking at your collection?
To answer the question. I really wouldn’t know how to gloat. I’m really not that noble. It’s my collection is purely for my enjoyment and pleasure. The one thing that brings me as much joy as the collection itself is talking and sharing it with someone who also appreciates it. So gloating just wouldn’t work for me.
I really think you are downplaying the achievement. When you first posted about it I really could not fathom how absurd but amazing your feat was. I think the award is truly deserved.
