General Forum

I'm both a buyer and a builder, however due to the rising costs of everything I am more a small piece by piece builder. I am a perpetual builder as it is often difficult for me to complete sets. Some sets I have been "building" for years, decades, almost centuries. The more time that goes by the harder it is to finish. Part of my problem is remaining focused on JUST one set while building. Still need the other 2/3 of 1965 Topps Baseball. Plus the current trend of making the hi-number cards in the base sets Short Prints or SUPER SHORT PRINTS. I really want to get the Stupid Short Print 2012 Topps Archives Baseball 241 Bryce Harper RC SSP Unfortunately since it has been valued at over $100 since DAY FRACKIN ONE! I will probably NEVER be able to get it. AND I'M A NATS FAN as well as a Harper fan. Now that he is super hot and only seems to be getting better (Love him or Hate him he is figuring out how to play the game) Really frustrated about that particular card and that is just the BASE card not the auto variant.

Pack busting is fun, but in order to really complete a set now days, you need to get at the very least 2 hobby boxes and even then the way things are correlated there is not guarantee of completion. Insert sets can sometimes be finished quickly if they are small enough and seeded often enough in the packs. Parallel sets forget it.

Lately, I have bought hand collated master sets for the 2015 Topps and the 2015 and 2016 Topps Opening Day.  Then I try to complete the master sets for the OD sets by chasing the parallels, autos and GU cards.  Did the same for the 2015 Topps Baseball Royalty inserts chasing the parallels #/99 and #/25.  I mostly buy individual cards online.  Though sometimes, if the price is right, I will pick up boxes as well.  I find that for completing sets, buying them outright can be more cost effective than buying boxes and chasing down the individual cards, especially when you add in the shipping.

I collect the short print and super short print variation from the Topps base sets that many hate so much.  I'll also keep one base set a year.  I buy a lot of product and re-sell almost all of it, keeping only the variation cards.  I don't care for the inserts for some reason, or the gold parallels and the like, just the photo variations.  I also have a soft spot for printing errors and will keep the occassional Phillie autograph.

I can usually make a small profit on what I buy, although if you break it down I probably only make about 50 cents an hour.  But the thrill of opening the packs is worth it to me.  Usually if you're looking for just a few singles or inserts within the first few days of a release, I should be able to help you out.  I don't keep much inventory on hand (wife won't allow it) so I move the stuff pretty quickly for whatever I can get for it.  Have recently started breaking basketball and football products from Panini.

Will be breaking a lot of Bowman tomorrow and keeping probably none of it.  Hopefully I can make a few bucks so that I can nab the next super short print that comes up for sale and is still on my wantlist.

Definately a set builder with the hopes of someday finishing my 57 and 61 Topps Baseball sets.  Though after finally finishing my 71 set from my youth 30 years later i up and sold it after the thrill of the chase ended and i had to pare down my collection to something more manageable spacewise.  However, to fill my time between card shows for the vintage cards i have been agressively trading here and using Listia to work on the A&G and GQ mini sets of all kinds and parallels since they take up less room and look good with 15 cards on a page.  With all of the SP and such and with each year adding yet more sets to collect it is a never ending hunt.  I did buy a hobby box of GQ this year and enjoyed ripping the packs open, however i have found more great pulls out of blaster boxes from Target.

If I ever finish the 71s (91% there), I promise I won't sell them. I will die clutching the binder, which my daughters can then fight over. 

I really like the randomness of buying random packs/boxes and trying to complete sets that way. I'm always excited when I need like 30 cards to complete a set and get an old pack where I need 2 of them. I can't buy sets....I need to collect the old fashioned way.

See, I was expecting answers like suomibear's. I respect that. Just got too expensive that way. And I was overwhelmed with doubles that I couldn't get rid of. Perhaps if this site and the Internet existed when I started buying sets, I would've just kept buying packs. Probably not. I'll keep buying sets of new stuff and slowly accumulating old. 

I love opening packs even if they are not particularly valuable. I recently bought a few boxes of 1990 donruss baseball just for the fun of opening packs now and then. See if I can build sets out of them. What I find insanely frustrating with building sets is the short print issues within certain sets. 1988 Donruss for example. So hard to get certain cards in packs. For any sets with short prints and for any sets with fairly valuable cards I can't justify opening packs. Makes so much more sense to just buy the factory sets.

I do keep an eye out in stores for when packs go on clearance as the stores prepare for the next years stock. That and my occasional purchase of 80s and 90s packs just for the sake of opening stuff. Only if I get them cheap though.

I've recently become more of a set builder, I'm on a budget and friends have given me so many cards to different sets I figured I might as well work on some. Any I complete I might try to sell it and put a portion of the money aside for my daughter's future. It's a hobby and investment that way. I like parallel sets as long as they aren't a huge set, a long challenge but still fun. I don't mind hunting sp's but the ssp's are just a waste of time to me. It's still  fun getting a jumbo or hanger because you never know what you get since they can't be searched!

Upper Deck was one of the worst of the ones to build sets from back in the early '90s. I recall buying pack after pack, or even full boxes and coming up a few cards short. This wasn't unique to myself, my Father, numerous friends, card shows, and shops wouldn't yield the required cards. Rarely would it be the stars, or rookies either, almost always some commons.

This was a problem across the board with their products. '90 and '91 baseball drove some friends crazy. I should've learned from that but tried building the '91 FB, '92-'93 basketball, and '91-'92 hockey. The hi-numbers in the series II was really bad at times with there being as little as 2 or 3 of them in the packs to go along with series one all over again. Won't even get into the madness their hockey sets presented with retail, hobby, jumbos, locker packs, French, etc. It caused my Father to just give up after a couple of years because all he was doing was UD hockey. He traveled a lot more than I did, and it was still hard for him to build sets with him hitting more spots in different states. The factory sets seemed more like an insult to us at the time, but I still bought a few to save myself the hassle when I could, if one was going to be made, especially with hi-numbers.

I don't recall Hoops, Skybox, Fleer or even the mighty Topps being no where near as bad with any of their sports when it came to making sets. Proset could be about like UD with some sets, and never tried to build Donruss, or Score, besides the first Pinnacle FB so can't really say how they were.

The glut of different sets, different inserts across a multitude of pack types, and the headache of building base sets is what caused me to stop even trying around '97 or '98. I checked a Beckett at the time from each of their magazines from the same month, for how many sets were out for that current year, and that was my wake-up call. Baseball had 38 sets listed, not counting inserts, separate series, updates, retail/hobby or any of that nonsense. Seems FB had 39, hockey 36, basketball was about the least at around 32, heck even NASCAR had 30 something sets. I knew something was very wrong, and decided to pick and choose wiser.

So since then I'll mainly buy singles, though there are exceptions where I at least would like to build a set. Oh and no more chasing draft picks, I had learned that already back early on though, saw too many "sure things" fail. I won't name anyone, as I know some did improve, and it blows me away people collect some of these guys still when I consider them wash-outs.

Like I said before, non-sports is usually a different animal. I'll sometimes try for a set if I like it, unless it's just a particular person I want their auto, or base cards of. Have also just collected the promos from some sets of those and stopped there.