Author - StevenWelcome to my blog! I collect hockey cards since my godmother gave me three packs of 1991-92 Pro Set for my 7th birthday. After collecting sets when I was young, my collection now focuses only on Pavel Bure! Here I'll talk about some accomplishments, stories, and rants about the hobby. |
8/27/2020 2 Comments I'm taking a breakOne day or another, I knew that this was coming. I didn't know when. It struck me this week, after a month or so of struggling.
I need a break from the hobby. I don't know how to express it correctly, too many questions are popping in my head at the moment. But all of them conclude to the fact that's inevitable; I need to step back for a bit, trying to get answers to my interrogations, and came back with a new (or the same) mindset for the future of the collection. The first thing that comes to my mind about this wall that I hit is I was way too invested in the collection. For the past five years, I spent countless hours (and dollars) into the hobby, always with the fear of missing a great deal. My mind was locked into a "buying, buying, buying" mode. If I don't have it, I need it. Plain and simple. I am lucky to have a good job, I can spend money on the hobby. Sometimes though, when many cards popped over a quick period, I didn't limit myself to certain of them. I want them all, and sometimes my credit card bill was a little bigger than expected. My mindset was "Hey, the more I purchase, the lesser it remains to have them all right?". Truth is it didn't go down as low as I thought. That was my first flag. The second one is something I knew that I wasn't gonna be able to achieve, but the completionist that I am didn't think the same way. Since the pandemic, sports cards have literally spiked to the point I didn't expect. It starts with baseball and basketball, as the pool of collectors is bigger. But slowly but surely, it gains the hockey cards world (at a lesser level of the two sports though). At first, only the big names of today's game gain a boost; Connor McDavid, Auston Matthews, Elias Pettersson. Sure values like Wayne Gretzky, Sidney Crosby, Alexander Ovechkin, Mario Lemieux, and Patrick Roy have also seen a jump in their value. Like baseball and basketball, collectors turned themselves to upcoming stars like Alexis Lafreniere and Quinton Byfield in the hopes they turned into superstars and make some bucks out of them. But where it hurts the most for me is here: collectors came back into the junk wax era and 90's stars like Bure, and the rare inserts, two areas that impacted my collection. If I was able to keep the pace, now I just can't when I saw some inserts go for 400-500$. Don't get me wrong here. It's good for the hobby in a sense, it's healthier than ever. But for me and my completionist OCD, it's not. Over the past few weeks, I saw some cards I chased for some time goes by at a crazy high price, and it frustrates me. It hits me harder than usual because my mind was "you need it for your collection". Flag number three is similar to number two in the sense that as a super collector, your goal is to have them all. But even though I'm aware that I'm not the only one who collects him, they are many niches collectors out there (only autos, only cards in his Vancouver sweater, etc). So I'm battling over collectors who spend their money on certain cards in particular, while I spend mine on all of them, which gave me a disadvantage. Again, don't get me wrong here. I consider many Bure collectors as friends. We help each other and share knowledge on rare oddballs, want lists, and trading, and I will never change that. So when it comes to cards we both need, I'm more on the losing side than on the winning side. Like I said earlier, I am lucky to have a good job, but I can't compete with collectors able to drop 1000$ for a piece of cardboard. The last flag, that crosses path with the second one, is that nowadays, everybody is into the high-end stuff. My assumption is that super collectors are a different breed. They are still players collectors in the hobby, but they only tend to collect the high-end stuff and don't care about the rest, which is not my case. I made a survey on Twitter just by curiosity, and the results are this: 57% of the pollers said that it's more impressionable to have 90% of a player's collection with no high-end than have all the high-end cards, but nothing else. It was pretty close, but it gives insights on the hobby. I have some wonderful conversations with other members of the community who has many constructive comments on the subject. It helped me expand my comprehension of the question and have partial answers regarding the ones I had. Which leads me to this: what do I do now? That's a really good question to which I can't answer now. That's why I need to step back and think of the future of my collection. My main objective is the website, to which I will continue to add new entries as I go through scanning my cards. I think it will bring me closer to what I have, and cherish them a bit more. Also, I still continue to be around on social media, talking with you guys. Even though I will distance myself from collecting as long as I need to, you will see me posts cards I haven't shown yet. There are also some packages that are still needed to come by. Furthermore, if I see an offer I cannot refuse or a card I need badly (ie for completing a rainbow or a year), I will do it. But for now, I won't force myself to spend hours searching the Web for cards I need (and dollars too). So with that said, thanks for the ride guys. Now I need introspection and time to think about what's ahead, what do I want to chase in the future, the foundation of my collection, and most importantly, me as a collector. I don't know how much time I need, but be sure that when I come back, I'll be hungrier than ever! See ya!
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