After making several big purchases over the last month, I feel that I’ve just about reached an end point in my Pokemon collection. I’m at the point where I have so much, that the thought of accumulating anything further, seems unnecessary. I know, I know. Feelings change. And I’m open to the idea of collecting again (should I get the urge), but for now, I feel at peace with what I have.
I was wondering if anyone else has had these feelings lately. Where do you feel, stage-wise, you stand with your collection? Are you at the end? The beginning? Or maybe you just don’t know. Would love to hear some differing perspectives!
Naturally as you check more and more items off your wanted list your collection starts to grow at a much slower pace. When I got back into collecting I was making several purchases a week and now I am only making maybe 1 or 2 a month. I think its completely normal.
I’ve gone through this myself, granted that was a decade ago. At first I just expanded my goals, going further and further into other set. I sat down and realized I just didn’t care about many of the sets I had, but more importantly I had too much. I started looking at my collection and came up with rules.
My first rule I don’t care about duplicate artwork, but at the same time I was a completionist. So my 1st ed sets were allowed to be in psa cases, but the unlimited were regulated to binders.
I also got rid of sets I wasn’t too interested in and came to the realization that most of the sets I liked were just the original ‘rookie’ cards if you will. So anything not meeting my standards were gone.
Finally, I used to have more of an error card/specialty prints that are now reduced to very few.
Most my collection is now what I consider to be complete, I’ve upgraded condition of the cards, but other than a few cards there’s very little I plan on adding in.
Not sure why I never went through this. Maybe cause the social side of it, and helping others with their goals, keeps it interesting.
In other words…your the reason this continues to be fun for me:)
Yeah a lot of collectors start side collections to feed that collector hunger. When I was only collecting bulbasaur I was making 2 purchases a month a best.
I’m getting quite close to the end of my current goals and I feel both the same and different. There’s less of a sense of urgency that I had at the beginning, when I’d have a large amount of cards left and wanted to get them done before prices started rising too high. I buy less now, and I don’t worry too much about checking eBay, Y!J and other sites as much as I used to. I think when I get the final 8-9 cards or whatever it is I need to finish, it will be a big relief and I may take a well-deserved break from buying, grading, selling, etc.
That being said, I derive so much enjoyment from the process of collecting. Whether it’s searching for a great deal or a mint condition/hard to find card, the anticipation of Pokemail, and the whole process of professional grading (purchasing raw cards, examining them, sending them off, waiting for the grades, getting the grades/cards back), I’m not sure if I could just ditch that. I don’t know what form that will take, be it new collection goals or just flipping cards here and there. But I hope to finish off my goals by the end of this year and then see where the future will take me.
I know how you feel, for the last probably 6-8 months I’ve been spending heavily on my collection. I got to the point near the beginning of May where I was checking eBay and ordering stuff but didn’t feel any joy in getting my orders. I knew I had reached the point where I was done with what I wanted to collect for now. I think a large part of it is that anything I would like to collect at this point is very expensive and I need to put that money toward other responsibilities like preparing for my first kid.
I have been collecting again for 2 years sometime this month. As of this point I can’t even fathom feeling done with collecting cause I’ve reached my goals. There always is in my opinion a new goal to be set!
Always wanted that psa 10 first edition base set Charizard,then you got it? Sweet! Set a new goal to get another! The more cards the merrier to me!
Adding cards I want is awesome to me (I personally can always come up with a new card I want), finding killer deals is also awesome to me (there’s almost no feeling like knowing i got a bargain), and I also relish the fact of simply knowing I own valuable stuff; and the more valuable stuff the better! Whether I even like the card or not.
For instance, I own a mint sealed Pokemon Red Version. I don’t collect video games at all nor do I have much interest in that aspect. Butttt I got it for a killer price ($400usd) which fills my bargain price category, and it’s a valuable rare item which fills my owning valuable stuff category. Win winnnn!
I’ve been a collector for as long as I can remember and I’ve always gone through phases of collecting. It started when i was super young with rocks, that transformed into collecting fossils, then coins, then vintage fishing lures (and making my own) then vinyl records and lastly old school car audio equipment.
The common denominator with all of those hobbies is that they came quick and left within a year or two. I would get super excited about them and then I would get bored with them. Some came back in small bursts but most of the time the desire left me and never came back.
The only exception to that has been pokemon. I was introduced to pokemon in the fall of 1999 by one of my best friends in kindergarten (we are still really close today actually). I started watching the TV series with my parents and I would try to get them to buy me a pack every week when we went to the store. I remember finding my gameboy color at a vacation home under the couch and it had pokemon blue in it. Assumed to have been lost by another child that stayed there before us. I had never been so excited and shortly after that I convinced my mom to buy pokemon silver for me at Walmart. I remember that day like it was yesterday.
No matter what has gone on in my life, pokemon has always come back to me and stronger each time. I get the same amount of joy every time I pull out my collection and every new card that comes in the mail is equally as exciting as the last, even if it’s just a $15 PSA 9 that is another step to completing a set. I imagine my bond with pokemon will continue for many, many years because there is always a new goal to obtain. (Unless you’re smpratte or Gary of course, they already have everything. Why are you all dven still doing this? Lol that’s the real genuine interest example for you)
I guess each collector has different motivations but I do not have a specific goal and that has kept my enthusiasm for the past two years.
There is a world of cards out there, personally I chase artwork/characters I like and cards that have some kind of historic significance within the hobby. Everytime I search for card, I find a few that I had never seen before and spend countless hours doing research about them before actually comitting to buy. In the end my personal collection is made up of seemingly random cards that for some reason or another caught my interest.
Best example of this is my Corocoro Mew, the first card that trully caught my eye, got me into collecting, and if I recall correctly made me find Scott’s youtube channel and this forum. It is just a random card among others but for me it has a particular significance that no one else attributes to it. I can point to a specific time in my life and recall the circumstances which led to me buying it, the room in my house where I was when I did it, how I found out about it, etc. Each card becomes sort of a frozen memory.
I think collecting full sets, interesting as it may be, doesn’t add that extra layer of nostalgia or personal history to a card in the sense that you don’t attribute individual significance to each card and rather to the set as a whole or the main chase cards within it.
As such, even though I don’t ever feel the need to stop collecting, I do understand that for completionists collecting may get stale easier.
I feel you. I’m nearing the same point in my collecting. It’s nice to finally have that feeling of being done but every time i feel that there’s more that comes along! I feel like sets are the easiest thing to be satisfied with. They have a specific number of cards and you pick what years or sets to collect. For me it’s completing the WOTC sets only. But then if you dabble in other stuff such as unnumbered Japanese promos, etc it really never “ends” for the common collector. There is so much out there
In my opinion never, but I have never bought much in this hobby. I’ve spent maybe $150 total in the last 14 months (when I came back to collecting) and have enjoyed every moment of it. Do I own a lot of cards? No. But that doesn’t matter to me. My favorite thing about this hobby hands down is the new information I learn every day, every hour. The moment I run out of things to do in this hobby, that’ll be enough for me. However, I don’t see that happening anywhere close in my lifetime.
This happened to me in a way when I came back to the hobby last year. As a completionist I convinced myself I’d start from the very first Japanese card and also collect modern product. I was ordering the new set each month from Japan, but quickly realized I got zero enjoyment out of the cards. In contrast, it was so exciting and interesting learning about the early cards and getting them little by little in the mail. So, I gave up entirely on modern sets and I’m significantly happier now. According to my spreadsheet I’m about 80% done with what I’ve set out to collect. Who knows what my next goal will be, if anything, but I’ve gotten a lot of joy out of things so far.
I’ve found reasons to stop and start again. My ultimate goal is a Snap Gyarados, which seems like such a far-off goal that I’ll diddle daddle in the mean time with some side collections. Still need all of the available variants on Volcarona.
Other than the Snap, I only have a few variants to get from some of the newer sets, but I’m waiting till prices drop for a couple of them. Only thing I would probably try to jump on immediately are Gray Stamps and to get my Square Cut Shining Gyarados back and another miscut double-dos.
Honestly, an idea I keep having that I haven’t dedicated to is the idea of starting a Pokemon collection where I just have 1 favorite artwork per pokemon featured. It’d be nice to upkeep because if I see a new favorite, I just sell the old favorite and replace it. I feel like a lot of mid-evolutions get underappreciated so it would be a good excuse to seek those out.
