Chaos and Kanji is the blog where I write about my adventures through Japan!

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Thursday, December 31, 2015

2015 in Review: My Goals


It's the end of the year, and that means it's time to reflect on the good and the bad. I will probably be simultaneously posting my personal reflection on the year on my Japan blog. So here is baseball.

The card collecting goals for 2015, with my accomplishments:
  1. Get six flagship sets that I need. I went above and beyond this goal. I've nearly finished the Upper Deck set run, I got a couple Topps flagship sets marked off the list, and I found a few well-priced auctions in the spring that made this goal easier than I expected.
  2. Locate the eight cards I need to finish the card portion of player collections for six players. I added several players to my player collection, but I managed to finish all of the regular ones except for Buster Posey's Topps RC. Or maybe I got that too but didn't mark it off. I have to check my purchase orders...
  3. Find at least five of the ten figurines I need for my player collections. I need 16 figures now thanks to additions to the list; I count only one figure purchase this year.
  4. Get down to 400 needed cards for my Awards collection. Done. I haven't updated the 2015 winners yet, but I currently sit at 379. And that's with three new collections on the want list. This goal was partially met by creating custom cards. I haven't printed any out, but I made cards for players with no cards or unattainable cards. That's 187 custom cards made over the course of a few days.
  5. Keep my MLB Type Collection over 25%. I started at 25.5% at the beginning of the year. There are still a few sets to add to my database, but those are super-new issues. I'm at 25.51% now though! I'm surprised I was able to maintain the collection, especially given the low number of 2015 cards I have and the addition of some other formerly-forgotten sets to the list.
  6. Reduce my wanted sets list to 175. The year started with 229 sets on the list. I'm at 174 now. I barely made that cut. I pushed hard around Black Friday to knock down or knock off several sets using COMC and Sportlots.
  7. Reach 60% of Japanese cards by the end of the year. From 54%, I've increased to over 63%. I need to rework the 2014 and 2015 lists to include several missing autograph, memorabilia, and parallel sets, though. I need to do a lot of research to make that happen, so I'm going to try to be more proactive about it with 2016 sets.
  8. Reach 50% of sets in the Japanese type collection other than BBM and Calbee. 52.5%, so done. There were several releases this year that helped, along with some modern card singles that I've found at card shows and shops. I really want to work on the vintage side, but I didn't go to any flea markets this year.
  9. Create and hopefully complete a collection for players who went from the NPB to the MLB. I created the collection, and I have most of the MLB cards for that collection. I just haven't taken the time to search for NPB cards, so that side sits at about 25% complete.
Not bad, only one missed collecting goal with another partially completed. I put forth a lot of effort with organization. My want/inventory lists have almost all been reworked and last weekend I reorganized all my loose cards here in Japan.

And while I didn't blog about it much and it wasn't in my collecting goals, I added Buck Farmer and Charlie Hough supercollections to my list. Closely following Buck's auctions on eBay has put me at 84.81% of his known cards (some 1/1s and /5s missing due to price or unavailability), and as for Hough, I'm at 64.57%. The missing cards there are mostly old team issues or recent autographs.

As a whole, I'm happy with my collection's progress this year.


And my blogging goals for 2015:
  1. Finally finish those Calbee Through the Years posts.
  2. I want to publish my Japanese set database.
  3. Continue posting new release details on all of the 2015 baseball sets.
  4. Fully update my Japanese card shop posts and publish a map and list.
  5. Make weekly "Idol of the Week" posts.

I didn't meet a single blogging goal this year. Some stuff I worked on a bit, but as a whole I'm disappointed in my blogging performance this year. Hopefully I'll have more motivation in 2016.

4 comments:

  1. Quite a few accomplishments and some carry over goals for next year. You did inspire me to start my own sumo wrestling menko and card blog so thanks for that. Thanks for the run down!

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    1. Thank you! I'm glad to be some help. If you're looking for anything in Japan let me know!

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  2. 63% of your collection is made up of Japanese cards? Not sure what's more impressive... the fact that over half of your cards are Japanese or the fact that you're actually so organized that you can pop out a percentage like that. both of these things are very, very, very cool. Happy New Year! Have a wonderful 2016!

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    1. Actually, I have 63% of cards for the Japanese type collection. I do have a ton of Japanese cards now, but I still have way more US cards. There have been so many more US card sets, though, so it's harder to keep up with them.

      I'll tell you what, spreadsheets and formulas are amazing things. Though I wish I had a good database app that could work with Google Sheets so I don't have to load entire tables with tens of thousands of lines every time I want to check something or update inventory.

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