Unpopular Opinion: Death of the Set Builder == Death of the Hobby

[webottew]

Great post, Rraincock! Well said

Set collectors are the canary in this mineshaft of a Hobby. They buy the cream of the crop, along with the "toss away" cards we see today. When set collectors are active, it keeps the inventory of cards on the secondary market in check, and also maintaining some value to the commons. But today we see a surplus of inventory, and a shortfall on demand. We are out of balance.

I've always considered myself a Set Collector. I've even built true Master Sets; 1 copy of every card released in the product. I have competed 4 such Master sets; 00-01 Topps Stars (/25), 01-02 Topps Heritage (/25), 02-03 Topps Heritage (/?, but likely < 20), 03-04 Parkhurst Original 6 - Maple Leafs (/20). Notice a pattern? They are all >= /20 and they are all prior to the first Exclusive of 2004.

I attend local Trade Nights and Series 1&2 and SPA are the only sets where collectors bring their checklists to make progress on their sets. I agree with others that the increase in S&H has driven away many online collectors.

But all hope is not lost. We see the annual Tim Horton sets are a rejuvenation of set collectors. Why? It's a small set in total. Sure, some of the inserts are challenging, but not certainly impossible. But most importantly, local LCS and more significantly the Tim Horton stores themselves, have embraced trade nights.

What will the future hold for set collecting? I can see the next evolution of set building be similar to ePack, or even collections on COMC. Send all your cards to a provider, and then swap ownership electronically. When complete, have the provider mail the cards to you. Minimizes the S&H impact.

[30ranfordfan]

What will the future hold for set collecting? I can see the next evolution of set building be similar to ePack, or even collections on COMC. Send all your cards to a provider, and then swap ownership electronically. When complete, have the provider mail the cards to you. Minimizes the S&H impact.

I'm very interested in seeing what COMC will come out with next. Changing the platform to allow for trades would be great for the users - I'm just not sure it helps their business (though anything that increases activity, and the volume of cards they're sitting on, maybe that does... even if transactions they don't make any money on happen?).

[toppscollector]

Regardless of whether one collects baseball, basketball, football and or hockey cards, there will always be set builders. However the set builders are not as prevalent as the player/team, Rookie, game used and autograph collectors. I collect all 4 major sports bnut mainly concentrate on baseball. Yes I do set building for only baseball, but collect vuntage, rookies, game used and autograph cards for all four major sports. Yet my collecting interests seem to have added retro sets to the mix. For the first time since 2009 I'm trying to build a non baseball set. The 2017-18 OPC Retro set. What I'm trying to say is that collecting hockey cards will never die, it'll just take the form of the baseball, basketball and football card collecting hobby. It'll evolve into player, team, Rookie, game used and autograph collecting for the most part but with set building becoming few and far between. It took years for the hockey card colecting community to follow in the footsteps that the rest of the hobby has taken due to higher prices for packs and boxes of cards as well as too much product being out there.