General Forum

I love all the sports.  For football, I was deeply saddened when Topps was shut out of the market.  I had to pick a few favorite sets and go after them because there are too many.  I found that I like the Score sets for a nice value collection.  Panini Prestige always has a great look in terms of brightness and color quality.  It was a sad day for football when Panini got the exclusive rights, now every card back is the same and none have multi years stats.  The backs are just awful on every single set.  Donruss aso has put out some really nice fronts the past three years.  I would start by looking at those three, but check out all the sets and whatever you like, I would go after Browns from there.  I have a lot of doubles from the last three years, but I am still on the process of logging my cards in the site, then I will go to moving my doubles to "for trade" and finally, populating want lists.  In the meantime, if there are any Browns you need in those sets, let me know and I can check my doubles.

Man, I've spent all all night just pouring over this site and you guys weren't kidding about how great it is. I've thought about how I want to collect and these are the things I will go after:

Football Sets

1. All Topps base sets
2. Short run sets (Pro Set, Action Packed, Wild Card, etc)
3. Topps Stadium Club 
4. Alternate Leagues (Arena, CFL, WLAF, etc)

Football Teams

1. Cleveland Browns

Players

1. Steve Young
2. Cards of players from my high school (Bedford, Ohio)
3. Cards of players from my college (Kent State) 
4. Sports cards of players who became professional wrestlers

Im also thinking of collecting wrestling cards, focusing on collecting Four Horsemen members

Welcome, it's great to see another football collector. I understand your feelings about modern cards. The offerings seem to change so much from year to year that it is hard to focus a collection. 

Personnaly I focus on Topps base sets. I started with the sets I collected as a kid ('70 - '85 Topps Football), but as my collection has grown I've expanded it to include newer Topps base sets as well. The problem with the newer sets ('95 - '15) is all the inserts. I too suffer from the need to get all the cards from a set. It's not a problem with the older sets that only have 1 or 2 insert sets, but newer sets can have dozens of insert sets and some of them are extremely short-printed.  I've decided to just collect one card of each insert set to have as example. I think this is achievable (minus the 1 of 1 type insert). 

For quick/cheap building, I'd go for complete sets where it's still affordable (lower grades for the more expensive ones). I wouldn't start piecemealing sets together until the costs of buying them at completed at low grade start to rise above reasonable affordability.  Use trading for those sets.  This probably won't apply if you're going for team or player sets, etc. 

Tully305 wrote:

Thanks for all the feedback guys!  Are there any tips you all have for quickly/cheaply building my collection up?  I need to catalogue my collection on here as I can dump my baseball cards from 70s/80s in trades for football hopefully. 

First, welcome back into collecting and enjoy what you like to collect. No set rules but since your an Browns fan I would say it should be alot easier to collect them than the Patriots ;)

As for fucusing, I see you have made up your mind for now, so enjoy the site and happy collecting.

Mark

Welcome to the site and welcome back to the hobby. 

I'm mostly a DC sports, Non-Sports (selective usually just Sci-fi, TV, movies) and Vintage (pre-1980 and semi-vintage 1980s), Set, Team and Player collector. Some of the more modern trendy things I try to avoid I'm not a fan of relic (game used or otherwise) cards. For Autograph (auto cards) I prefer on-card signature to the on-sticker ones. I often go or fall for serial numbered cards. Sometimes the cards they do serial number I think they should not have and some of the cards that should have serial numbers don't.

As far as possible trades I don't think I have any Steve Young available.I should have some Browns cards laying around. I'll get back with an estimate of number of Browns I have. It would be mostly base cards anywhere from mid 1980s up to maybe last year. Some doubles might be in the mix.

Welcome to the site, and back to the hobby.  Concerning the Four Horsemen collection, that would be fun.  Topps still usually includes a Ric Flair card in every set, and sometimes, Arn, Tully, Lex, and Barry too.  And I also like the football cards of wrestlers.  Mongo, Droz, Wahoo, Ladd, Lesnar, and JBL quickly come to mind as options.

Just remember, keep it fun, or it can overwhelm you.

Thanks!  I just snagged a bunch of Leaf cards last night of Tully Blanchard, Ole Anderson, JJ Dillon and Barry Windham. 

Also started collecting earlier this year after finding a box of NFL Pro Set cards we had from 1990. Have many of these to list for trade and can help you get started there. Will take Tigers and Lions in return. Been on this site for a few months and agree with everyone else how great it is. Happy collecting.