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

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Wednesday, April 11, 2018

If You Don't Know You Want It, Do You Still Want It?

The thrill of the chase is really step two.

How do you figure out what cards you want? There are definitions to any collection. Maybe you only collect Topps cards with three-digit prime numbers whose subjects were born outsde of the continental United States. Maybe you chase acetate inserts, or collect every card issued under the Donruss name. Maybe you have a type collection or player collection. Or maybe you want everything. 

But I'm not talking about definitions. I mean discovery. I want all of Buck Farmer's trading cards. It's no easy task, but at least most of his cards show up on eBay pretty quickly, and I'm thus quickly alerted to its existence. And the Trading Card Database and Beckett's database both have decent records for mainstream stuff.

Japanese cards are another question, though. TCDB is far from complete when it comes to MLB issues, and even farther behind for NPB sets. Even Japanese collecting experts are still figuring out many checklists; modern releases might be easier, but until last year, BBM didn't post reliable information about parallels in its sets.

And then there are promo cards. I would gather that NPB Card Guy's SCM list is the most comprehensive in existence, but gaps still remain. And for all the work he's put in, I still am not sure if my want list for that set is complete.

I found this card last weekend:
This is headed for my Women In Sports collection, namely the big stack of cards from the SCM releases which feature women in sports.

There could be more cards on that checklist that I want which I don't have on my lists. I don't know. Which makes me wonder: should I keep searching SCM stacks if/when I do finally find the last few cards I know I want?

So how do you know what you want? How do you create those lists? I might expand on this myself in a future post.

12 comments:

  1. And now I can update the SCM checklist because you've confirmed that card is SCM #34. Little by little I get closer to having the whole thing done. Of course I still don't know if that's a promo card for a set BBM did or just a one-off.

    I have a similar problem with the SCM cards - every time I think I've got all the ones I'm interested in, I see something that makes me change my mind. This is probably part of the reason I've never seriously tackled a similar checklist for the Shukan Baseball cards - I don't need more temptations...

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    1. I noticed you were missing this card number.

      While I only sporadically collect wrestling cards, and have no real experience with 2004's cards, I'm never seen anything like this. That said, a lot of the cards I have seen from this era have so many designs that it's possible it was used in a set. Only time will tell.

      I would be curious in a Shukan Baseball checklist. Almost everything I've seen are promo cards. It'll definitely be a more difficult operation, unless there's a really good Japanese list out there, thanks to the lack of continuity in card numbering. I'm most curious in the cheerleader cards and any non-baseball cards (I doubt they did any, but then again...); I know of a couple cheer cards I'm missing but there could be more.

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    2. From the research I did a few years back it looked like most of the post-2010-ish Shukan Baseball cards were just promos for other BBM sets but some of the earlier stuff was more interesting.

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    3. That doesn't look like the base design of BBM's 2004 True Heart wrestling set. I have a full base set on the way, so maybe it will match up with a subset, or maybe it's just a one-off. Here's what the front of Ofune's 2004 base card looks like:

      https://photos.app.goo.gl/482oMUHXeLIzyeVv1

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  2. As a creature of impulse, I feel like I want anything that I deem cool (which is often code for anything I don't have yet). But I usually sleep on it by keeping it on a watchlist for a month or two. If I still want it, I strongly consider it. If I don't I delete it and think that I didn't need it after all.

    Good luck with your chases though.

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    1. I have done that a few times. And most recently, I've decided to collect the Fragments of the Farm relic sets after thinking about it for a couple months. Things rarely get deleted, unfortunately!

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  3. SCM printed the insert checklist in some of their issues. Are those not completely accurate?

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    1. The list was mostly accurate but didn't give a lot of detail. They would say that issue #13 had a card of Koji Uehara but not that it was an original card rather than a promo version of a regular BBM card.

      SCM's list also didn't include the number of the card, probably because not all the cards had numbers - there's 467 SCM cards but only 397 had numbers.

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  4. Most of the lists I bother creating are the ones I've made for sets I'm building. I do have a left handed Cy Young Award winners autograph project I'm currently building... and I made a list of guys I still need. And I have a list of cool action shots of the 70's cards I'm trying to collect as well. Other than that... I usually just buy cards that I stumble across and really want.

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    1. I used to be that way, too - just the sets I'm building. But back then, I never really bothered finishing the sets, so I had all these lists of sets that never got built.

      I have to be careful about buying random cards. I did that when I got back into collecting and ended up with a bunch of garbage. And then went higher-end and ended up with a ton of nice hits that had no real fit in my collection (that was a nice Christmas, though, since I listed all of them on eBay).

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  5. I wanted a camera with a 28x optical zoom that stayed consistent f2.8 all the way to the end of its telephoto.

    Started wanting that in 1993. Not sure when the Panasonic FZ10 was released, but I bought it as soon as I could.

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    1. Interesting... I had similar thoughts with computer stuff back in college. "a program that does x" or "hardware that does y". Cloud computing is an amazing thing, that's for sure, as is pocket wifi.

      Speaking of cameras, I'm pretty happy with my current one - fairly portable, a decent optical zoom and good HD video. I do wish I had better low-light options, but I haven't had much of a need for that in recent years.

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