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I consider myself to have a fairly healthy collection at over 52,000 cards, which includes every complete Topps+Traded/Update from 1969-present, as well as the majority of the '50s-'60s Topps/Bowman cards.

What I can't figure out is how are people coming up with 4X the number of the size of my collection.

Although it's certainly possible, I can't help but think that people are counting their doubles as part of their collection.  You'd have to have every complete set from the past 50 years from one brand in all four major sports to come up with over 200,000 cards in your collection--unless you're counting double.  Even though I have over 20 complete sets of 1987 Topps, I only count 792 of those cards as part of my personal collection. 

What do you all think?

I believe a person can count whatever he has as part of his personal collection.  If he wants to count only singles, fine.   If he wants to count doubles too, fine.    This is a hobby to make yourself happy, not a contest.

Look at my points, which means I have scanned in roughly  275,000  unique cards front and back.   I will continue scanning for many more years. 

The majority of collectors on here have their collections public. (I do). You can literally see exactly what they have. I actually have even more but a lot of them I can't find checklists on to post and I have not bothered to enter my college basketball collection, which is around 2,010 cards. Total number of cards I have that are not listed yet on the Database is probably about 3000, perhaps a little less, perhaps a little more.

Duplicates do NOT count in the stat pages. I know this for a fact as I was just looking at my own collection vs. the stats page in the past week.

I believe Dave Sosidka has over 1 million unique cards....and I don't believe that would get him into the Guiness Book of World Records either.

When you collect everything...even everything in a specific sport...for decades, it adds up. I've been collecting for 28 years without a break and I'm at roughly 140,000 cards...which is a drop in the bucket to some people, but literally all than I can afford.

Let's see, how to respond? I'll go with bullet points. 

1. I don't count doubles in my collection. I once gave thousands of doubles away. Others might count them. It's just a different way of counting. Whatever. 

2. I don't quite get it either. But I look through people's collections sometimes, and I realize they're collecting all sorts of different sets which totally spikes the numbers. Pretending to be competitive, trying to stay in the top 100 baseball card collections here, is what partially inspired me to start collecting Gypsy Queen. 300 more cards a year! (I don't do shortprints.) And I could collect more from the literally thousands of sets available. But I don't want to. Feels too unfocused. So I take pride and joy in my vintage collection and buy more limited volume. 

3. I'd still like to see a stat on biggest pre-1980 collections. 

4. But of course I couldn't care less in the end. People want to add 10,000 variations of cards each year? Let 'em enjoy it. I'll buy the Topps base set and Gypsy Queen set and keep working on 1970 and 1971 and buy three tobacco cards. Can't keep up with the Joneses, but I can admire their stuff. 

5. I won't say I have too many cards, but I feel confident that if I had 100,000 different cards, I'd have little appreciation for 95% of them. That why I'm really leaning on better display of fewer cards I truly love than binder upon binder of cards I barely know I have. 

6. To each his own, as long as it doesn't affect me. 

Happy collecting. 

V3

I think if you are worried about how many cards you have as opposed to how many someone else has, you are collecting for the wrong reason. I don't care how many I have, it just happens to show it.

I have to reply, as I'm one of those with over 100,000 cards "collected" on the site (83,000+ in baseball, 17,000+ in hockey, and not done listing all the hockey we have).

I mentioned it in another post earlier, I only have my sets listed. Now, I don't limit my collection to one sport, or one company. I have the complete run of Topps from 1973-present, Donruss 1981-1992, Fleer 1981-1992, 1994, Score 1988-1992, Sportflics 1986-1990, Upper Deck 1989-1996, and all of the traded/updates that go with those sets. I have a few Chrome, Heritage, & Archive sets as well. I also have some random Bowman, Fun Pack, Classic, etc. sets and a slew of minor league sets. I also don't have all of my Star Co stuff listed yet. I don't have anything listed on the site twice. I have some stuff twice. Player collections are in addition to the cards in sets (none of them are catalogued here). If I ever got all the unique collection cards on here, I may have close to 200,000 cards truly collected (that would include duplicates, but because of the player collections, I collect duplicates). I also have about 80,000 cards that are duplicates that are available to find new homes. I have determined that listing all of them would take the rest of my life. :)

So, it's possible. And I don't even have a lot of sets in the 1993-2012 range. I keep track of my sets in Excel (like I do the rest of my life, it seems), and I have the cells color coded (yellow for have, but boxed, green for have and sheeted, red for want, black for doesn't exist, and blue for exists but not going after ), and there are a lot of blue cells (they start in 1992 however, and run through present day, nothing prior to that).

Kind of a timely forum thread as I just completed entering my collection into the database.  This includes all of my cards in the sets I have started or completed and the cards for sale or trade (I trade only unless someone really wants a card and has nothing to trade).  I have not entered any duplicate sets even though some of the junk era sets I have too many of.  Other than a couple of thousand cards, these are all baseball.  My collection ended at 140,000+ (12th place in the stats for what it is worth). And I have about 15 sets in my collection that are not in the database. The stats only count one of any one card so if you have one in your collection and one for trade, the stats will only show 1 card.

So yes it is possible to accumulate 200,000 cards, especially if you collect all sports and non-sports.  That would be too much for me - I long ago narrowed my collection to baseball.  I keep track of them on excel as does vroomed though without the color coding.  I also have a separate collection of Hall of Famers and players I liked when they played under a separate member call sign (sandy's singles).  Though many of these are duplicates to this sets only collection, it would probably add another 1000+ cards.

And now that my Trade list is complete, I continue to add more cards as the trades come in.  As I was entering my list into the database, there is a Cleveland Indians collector on this site who has increased his personal collection via a couple of trades.  Another frequent trade partner collects KC Royals.  Recently a Reds collector (I assume from his callsign) proposed to build a trade for 500 cards off our wantlists.  And last night, someone proposed a 90-card trade which I am about to accept and pull the wanted cards for him.

So what to do in-between trades?  Well, the site says I have over 1000 cards missing images so that is my next task during my morning coffee.  That should take me well into the fall.  But if you wish to trade, priority will be placed on filling in your requests.  400,000+ cards to trade, all sorted by company, year, set, and number so easy to find any card you ask for.

I appreciate many of the responses--especially from some of the Top 50 collection members.  Perhaps my initial question wasn't the best worded, but I was just looking to start a new forum since it was starting to get a little quiet.  

When I initially looked at the member's collection rankings, it was originally in the baseball category.  I sometimes forget there are other sports.  It was a childhood dream to someday complete the entire collection of Topps baseball cards--base and traded sets.  

I like the excel idea presented above, and I performed a quick check of my missing cards using it.  I'm missing approximately 2150 of the 3057 Topps cards from the '50s, and only 1488 of the 5991 Topps cards from the '60s.  Completing my dream would add only about 3633 more cards to my collection--and I have over 52K baseball cards now.  

That's why I asked the question.  It's not that I don't believe the size of someone's collection, or that I'm in competition with how many cards other people have.  I'm just in awe with the magnitude of the collecting dreams of others, as mine doesn't take me beyond 60,000 baseball cards in 2016.

Of course, I collect pre-Topps cards too, like: Bowman, Play Ball, Goudey, American Caramel, etc.  Those sets are typically much smaller, and the acquisition of those cards is also much slower.  I've had to resort to collecting reprints for some of the more expensive sets as a filler until I can replace them with originals.  

Thanks for you continued responses.