set building and insert for insert trading

[wngfan]

I didnt see anything wrong with what you have set up. I was a set collector myself (for close to 40 years) up until a couple years again when I lost all interest in hockey cards because of the fact it was so hard trying to complete them and the price it cost.

I would gladly trade you cards you need for your sets if you could help me with pocket schedules from hockey teams near you? Please send me a PM if you have any interest in that?


Thanks, Brian

[jogesc2]

Thanks for everyone's comments. I actually thought having a file where people could filter for what they are looking for would be ideal, but starting to see a lot of others traders sites where they are in lists. I guess its the accountant in me in wanting to build an excel file where you can filter and sort for sets/players. I've made some changes, but my dislike with a google doc is that I still like using excel on my desktop, and the online version doesn't automatically sync between google docs and excel. Still a work in progress, but appreciate the advice. Also, glad to hear from a few other set collectors!

+1 from another accountant

[fleurynut]

Mark for later.

[Drewk86a]

Thanks for everyone's comments. I actually thought having a file where people could filter for what they are looking for would be ideal, but starting to see a lot of others traders sites where they are in lists. I guess its the accountant in me in wanting to build an excel file where you can filter and sort for sets/players. I've made some changes, but my dislike with a google doc is that I still like using excel on my desktop, and the online version doesn't automatically sync between google docs and excel. Still a work in progress, but appreciate the advice. Also, glad to hear from a few other set collectors!

Most people have access to an Excel program (or generic version capable of opening excel files). Once you have the file on your device it is easy to add filters to the columns.

[WillM2121]

Very good advice in this thread!

[Sharky94]

First off, there just aren't as many set builders as there used to be. Most boxes are just too expensive these days to be able to do it with a good chance of completing them. And since the companies have made any worthwhile card into a special subset or short-print, it's nearly impossible to complete sets with most of the good cards. Nobody really wants a "complete set" if there are no rookie cards in it. That aint really complete, and most rookies these days are SPs or worse. And putting together sets of just base cards is a waste of time, because you can pick those up at shows or on EBay for pennies from all the case breakers who dump the base cards for nothing just to get rid of them.

Second, you have the postage debacle lately which makes it nearly impossible to trade across borders for low-end cards. Nobody wants to trade $2 cards when it costs $8 to send a padded envelope to Canada from the US. Not as bad coming South, but still too much. So if you don't have a couple $20 cards, its not really worthwhile. It would be foolish for me to send a trader to Canada for $8, when most of the time, I can find the same card on EBay for less than the cost of me mailing my trader, and then I don't even have to send mine away or make the trip to the PO.

Third, you have the Great Philosophical Debate between Buckets and Lists. Some people refuse to looks at buckets, and some people refuse to look at lists. One time I saw a guy looking for Joe Sakic cards. I sent him the link to my COL album (I organize my bucket by teams) and told him I have over 70 Sakic cards in there. He wouldn't look and kept asking me to create a list for him to look at (asked me three times). So instead of taking the 3 minutes it would have taken him to look at my bucket, he wanted me to write out 70 different cards into a list. It probably would have taken me 3-4 hours to do that because I would have to look at the back of every card to figure out what set it was from and type them all in, and I am sure he would have said, "Sorry, got all those." Needless to say, I didn't bother. Guess he didn't really want the cards that badly.

On the flip side, I wont look through lists that are more than 100 cards or so because it takes too long to read each individual card to figure out what it is. I am one of those dreaded player/team collectors. If it isn't Tomas Hertl, I only collect Sharks/Capitals cards that I like the look of or I can trade locally. I can scan a bucket in no time just looking at the uniforms. Reading a list takes a lot longer, and if you do see something of a player you recognize, you have to sit there and think, "Was that before or after he got traded?" etc, etc. Also, simply listing a card doesn't tell the whole story sometimes. If you say you have a Cup/99 of so-and-so (or really any jersey card), people are going to ask you what it looks like. Whether its a plain white jersey or a 6-color pattern makes ALL the difference in the world, and what it looks like can be the difference between a $2 card and a $200 card.

And fourth, I think the people who bust boxes are fewer and farther between these days. It simply isn't cost-efficient to bust boxes if you are not set up to sell everything you open on EBay (and can afford the time to do all that). Many people have stopped busting boxes and simply go for their player/team because its so much cheaper that way. The card companies have simply destroyed the set building community because of the costs. I open boxes occasionally, but its almost always just one or two of what I really like, and then I search for Hertl on EBay. Since I only end up with a couple handfuls of traders from each set, it isn't worth my time usually to try to organize them and trade them.

Now organizing your lists well is something of an art form, and can really help you. The easier you make it for people to navigate, the easier you will make a trade. I still can't get over the people that just cut-n-paste different lists together, so it is just one big non-stop list with years/brands/etc all mixed in and in no order at all. I don't see how those people ever make a trade. I refuse to even think about going through one of those.

Your best bet is to go on the Trading Forum as soon as possible after a set comes out and search the posts of guys posting their traders they just opened. If you wait too long, people forget what they have, or don't update their lists, or can't remember what box they put them in, etc. Doesn't make it easy to compete older sets, so the longer you wait, the further behind the curve you'll be.

And when you get down to the end of the set, I am sure something like COMC should come in very handy. If you only have a couple needs, being able to pick them up from one place and pay one shipping charge can be very easy. Doesn't help that you have to pay for them and can't trade. But when you get down to the end, it should save you a lot of time.

[creasecollector]

Good points there ^ Thanks for taking the time to share your insight !

[skgord]

I don't trade here or other sites that much anymore because some of those sites have been shut down and many of the people I used to trade with might had quit the hobby.
Now I don't have any trading friends that would save cards for me like before.
I used to like to build base sets but when they started short printing the rookies it makes it too hard to have complete sets so I stopped.
I don't buy much packs or boxes so I don't have much to trade. The last few years I mainly just buy what I need and only come on here once in a blue moon!
I know how you feel about people only wanting to trade for higher end and low numbers. I think that's the reason I couldn't do much trades.
If you have anything I can use I would trade with you. Most of my trades are probably low end.

At the moment i'm even having trouble trying to finish the Tim Hortons set because people will people only want the high end inserts no one wants to trade base or low end inserts anymore!

I also don't have a link or trading site myself.

[skgord]

I was just like you 10 years ago and now I still don't have list or website.

[creasecollector]

I personally don't bother with creating tradelists for myself. I just scan my cards and throw them up in my Traders folder on Photobucket.

The only card list I've created (thanks to SCF's database & easy text conversion) is my Jhonas Enroth card wantlist.