PSA: Carded Collectors Please Protect Your Stuff

Posted by Chris on 04/26/18 at 02:34 PM Category: Vintage Collection

It also keeps filthy kid hands away from your toys.

Now that The Vintage Collection is back, a lot of collectors will resume "one to open and one to keep carded" collecting. Let's look at that word "collector" for a second. Where is the line drawn between "collector" and "hoarder"? It's quite simple. A "collection" is curated. It is preserved. It is managed. A hoarder merely accumulates for the sake of accumulating. If you acquire items with a mind that it will need to be curated, it's a self-managing process since you can't accumulate more than you can manage. You won't ever have to worry about appearing on a TLC program (unless you eat yourself immobile).

I've been asked to evaluate collections in the past. It's usually someone who casually collected, or someone who didn't collect themselves but came into possession of a collection. I would look at their mass of Star Wars items and they would wait breathlessly for me to deliver my five-figure appraisal. As I looked at creased cards with frayed edges and crushed boxes, I had the unfortunate task of completely resetting their expectations to only three-figure values. To be fair, a good portion of that reset comes from the fact that these collections I've described are almost always heavily comprised of POTF2 items, but they would still have value if the they were in decent shape. People will pay for nicely preserved carded samples. They're actually starting to become scarce.

So if you're jumping back in the carded collection fray, don't be a hoarder. Don't maniacally buy carded samples only to store the mostly square card in a Rubbermaid bin which has rounded corners and will beat the edges of the cards to death. If you're going to spend $13 on a carded sample, spend $2 more on a Star Case. You'd be foolish not to. I recently purchased 50 Star Cases from Collecting Warehouse (see below) for just over $100 shipped (arrived in three days). You want the Star Case 1 for the Vintage Collection. It's fitting that it's the Star Case 1 for the one true scale on the one true card. Bantha Skull has no relationship with Collecting Warehouse and we receive no compensation for this promotion. This truly is a "PSA." If you're going to acquire it, protect it!