How To Start a Hockey Card Collection: Player Collecting

[creasecollector]

Hey everyone,

I recently posted a Part 2 for my original How To Start A Hockey Card Collection blog posts and I'd appreciate it if you check it out. Thanks!

If you have any tips that you'd like to share during your own player collecting experiences, please feel free to leave a comment here or on the blog.


How To Start A Hockey Card Collection: Player Collecting

[RGM81]

Great stuff as always, my friend. Really enjoy reading these primers. This excerpt in particular I'm sure hits us all at some point in our collecting lives:

A collector collects an impressive collection of a certain players' cards, but as soon as they're traded it errupts a massive fire sale and they are cursing the player/teams name all over the place and have sunk a bunch of time and money into something they no longer enjoy, all due to a simple sports transaction.

There's a laundry list of guys, from the Canadiens alone, that I've seen this happen with, and it's happened to me a couple times as well. Galchenyuk stands out in particular since he was such a high draft pick and the hype around him. Meanwhile, Gallagher's cards, which came out at the same time because they were both 13-14 rookies, were cheaper then and hold much greater value now. I had to Google where Galchenyuk is now because I vaguely recall him getting traded again just before the deadline, and yeah, the Wild, where hockey card collections go to die.

That circles back to your section on prospects--it can either pan out big time to get in on a guy early, or you end up holding on to a bunch of stuff wondering what could have been. Going into a player's draft year, if you're good at it, you can end up sitting on a goldmine because a guy is rising up the rankings and you know he'll be a top-ten pick, or you luck out and the Leafs/Habs pick Prospect X. Just make sure that if you're prospecting to move them, get all that CHL and Team Canada stuff out the door because they'll never be as hot as they are in the first few weeks after the draft. Once their YG's and stuff hit the market, it's all about that. Of course, the flipside is that some guys hit their peak in the CHL or have an amazing World Juniors, and never reach that level of success at the NHL level. We all look back on the Nail Yakupov hype now and chuckle...unless you're the beleaguered Oilers fan who went heavy on him.

[creasecollector]

Great stuff as always, my friend. Really enjoy reading these primers. This excerpt in particular I'm sure hits us all at some point in our collecting lives:



There's a laundry list of guys, from the Canadiens alone, that I've seen this happen with, and it's happened to me a couple times as well. Galchenyuk stands out in particular since he was such a high draft pick and the hype around him. Meanwhile, Gallagher's cards, which came out at the same time because they were both 13-14 rookies, were cheaper then and hold much greater value now. I had to Google where Galchenyuk is now because I vaguely recall him getting traded again just before the deadline, and yeah, the Wild, where hockey card collections go to die.

That circles back to your section on prospects--it can either pan out big time to get in on a guy early, or you end up holding on to a bunch of stuff wondering what could have been. Going into a player's draft year, if you're good at it, you can end up sitting on a goldmine because a guy is rising up the rankings and you know he'll be a top-ten pick, or you luck out and the Leafs/Habs pick Prospect X. Just make sure that if you're prospecting to move them, get all that CHL and Team Canada stuff out the door because they'll never be as hot as they are in the first few weeks after the draft. Once their YG's and stuff hit the market, it's all about that. Of course, the flipside is that some guys hit their peak in the CHL or have an amazing World Juniors, and never reach that level of success at the NHL level. We all look back on the Nail Yakupov hype now and chuckle...unless you're the beleaguered Oilers fan who went heavy on him.

Totally agree. Thanks for the comment man, I really appreciate it.