The Curse of Wanting It All

As mentioned in yesterday's welcome-myself-back-to-blogging post, I'm currently dabbling in all sorts of hockey card manias to figure out what I actually like; what's relatively easy to procure; what'll always be too expensive to chase, and so on. I pretty much mastered the baseball card market the past few years, understanding (more or less) what the yearly releases were and where I wanted to spend my time.

The problem I found is that I wanted to spend my time with all of it - or at least most of it. I accumulated more San Francisco Giants cards than I knew what to do with; opened up player collections for at least 15-20 guys; started trying to complete a dozen or more vintage sets; started spending $$ on promising prospects like Joey Bart and Jo Adell who haven't done JACK in the big leagues with their god-given talents, and so forth. It was fun, no question, but then I had to clean a ton of it out to keep my sanity.

With hockey, I think I'm just going to actively go for one player collection: Patrick Marleau. More about that guy in a future post. I can see small PCs assembling for guys like Joe Thornton, Peter Forsberg, Brent Burns and maybe even Mika Zibanejad. As you can see from some of these scans here, I'm also just buying stuff to see what sticks; all of these are interesting cards that came from 2020-21 and 2021-22 Upper Deck Series One and Extended. Now I'm probably going to have to collect all those "Dazzlers", damn it. They're just too great.

I was listening to a new hockey card podcast called Hockey Cards Gongshow (it's a good one), and the fellas behind it were talking about 3 types of card accumulators: "Collectors", "Investors" and "Flippers". While I suppose there's always a part of me that would like to have a buy-and-hold investment in a card I got lucky enough to pull from a pack, that market-based way of thinking about the hobby does nothing for me, and never has - to say nothing of "flipping". The whole breaks, 1/1, what-is-the-market-for-this-card mentality rubs me the wrong way. The Hockey Card Gongshow guys are a little too Wall Street Week-esque at times for my tastes, but their love of the sport and of the players they're collecting overrides all - and hey, I wouldn't be lying if I told you I wish this Ilya Sorokin insert right here was stamped 1/1 on it, or that I'd have loved to get a Trevor Zegras Young Guns out of the packs I bought yesterday.

Anyway, such is the curse of wanting it all. I'll bumble along with hockey cards for a while, trying to complete the stuff on my want list and experimenting with the rest.