$600

Hey there! It's been a while. How've you been? Thanks for asking.

Hell, I damn near forgot this thing was still here.

Well, that's something I'm hoping to improve on this year (if you're reading this I've already surpassed last year's output). Like so many other bloggers, it became much easier to post my thoughts and comments on the hobby in real time on Twitter rather than sit down and spend an hour or two writing a blog post. But every once in a while a topic is just too long for twitter. This is one of those times.

After 40+ years of building at least some kind of set just about every year, I've decided to call it quits. No I'm not leaving the hobby. I'm no longer going to BUILD sets. I'm just going to buy them instead.

Buying complete sets is not new to me. I've been doing it with Bowman and Bowman Draft since 2013, Archives since 2013, and Flagship and Update since 2016.

Like most set collectors I've grown tired of spending big money to build sets that are only worth a fraction of what I spent (and with a slew of useless inserts that are worthless too. What exactly am I paying that much money for? The disappointment of opening packs??).

With what should have been a relatively easy set last year with Big League, I'm now over $200 into it and I'm still 25+ cards short of a complete set.

Happily those days are over now.

So I've sat down and made a list of what sets I want to /collect/buy, how much I expect to pay for them, and added in for binders and pages, and came up with a projected budget for 2019.

$600

What am I hoping to get for that $600? Well, here goes:

Baseball
Topps Flagship    $50
Topps Update      $25
Bowman              $30
Bowman Draft    $30
Archives             $100*****
Big League         $50
Donruss              $50

Football
Score                  $75
Donruss              $40

Binders and Pages $150

Total $600

Some of these are known expenditures while others are guesses, because I've never bought some of these sets before. For instance, I know you can get a factory sets of Flagship for $50 and Donruss football for $40. I have no clue what hand-collated Big League or Donruss baseball sets will cost. I don't even know if anybody even does them. I guess this could all make for potential future blog posts as each set is acquired to see how it's going. Yes, I purposefully left the word "interesting" out of that sentence.

*****Archives base sets can be had for much cheaper than $100. I just picked up the 2018 set for $35 shipped. But Archives is pretty much the only set where the inserts are interesting enough for me to pick up too. Plus you never know which year there are going to be base SP or not, or a really cool Tigers auto like Rusty Kuntz in 2017.*****

"But all the fun in set building is, you know, actually BUILDING the set." I agree. However, I've reached the age in life when keeping hundred dollar bills in my wallet IS A LOT MORE FUN. Or better yet, spending those hundred dollar bills building vintage sets at NSCC will be THE MOST FUN!

As I've previously posted, there are other ways to have fun with sorting and paging sets that can give some slight illusion to having built them yourself. I'm not linking to it because you can literally read that post next when you finish this one. Or you can skip to it now and come back to this one later. I'm down with whatever path you choose.

Am I going to miss set building? Absolutely. There IS a great sense of pride and accomplishment when finishing a build. But with each year it gets harder and more expensive. As someone once said, "all good things must come to an end." (The producers of LOST maybe?)