Not a New Year’s Resolution But a New Collecting Mindset
The past two years, I boldly gave my Collecting Resolutions as editorials for this newsletter. In 2024, I said I was going to organize my hockey action figure collection. And for 2025, I claimed that I was going to try to finish as many sets as possible.
So, how did I do on those resolutions?
Well, my 2024 resolution – of organizing my hockey figures – didn’t actually happen until 2025. But I guess the important thing is that I did it. I cataloged and organized my collection of Starting Lineup figures and Headliners figures. I did not inventory my McFarlane SportsPicks, but that’s a collection I have no plans of trying to complete. If anything, I need to thin those out quite a bit.
My 2025 resolution was to complete as many sets as possible. I finished off 11 sets in 2025, and I will have another two sets done once I get some cards shipped from COMC. So, I guess I could honestly say I completed 13 sets last year.
Back in December, I decided to reorganize my “Card Closet of Chaos,” because it was such a pain to dig through it whenever I needed to find cards or put cards away. And finding pages or other supplies was also a chore.
I reorganized the entire closet. And now I want to reorganize everything. Not just my card supplies, not just my bookcases full of binders, not just my boxes of personal collection cards and doubles, but EVERYTHING.
Poor organization is what is holding me back as a collector. I told myself that I don’t have enough space, or that I need more space, but that’s not true. I just don’t utilize my space as good as I could.
So, this year, I am going to take a top-to-bottom, holistic approach to organizing my collection. Question everything that I do as a collector, and how I can do things better.
For example, when reorganizing my “Card Closet,” I realized that I had two three-foot shelves full of boxes of “set builds” – incomplete sets that I am working on. But why? That’s prime real estate for cards that I don’t go through too often.
I decided that that same space would be better used to hold 24 two-column shoeboxes. This gave me some more space to organize my cards. Once organized, it will be easier to figure out which ones I want to keep and which ones I want to sell.
The aforementioned incomplete sets got “relegated” to a low shelf in another room that is in a kind of inconvenient spot, but I don’t need to get to them all the time, so it makes sense.
Now, I am going to systematically go through my card binders. I have some half-complete and near-complete insert sets that I need to purge, which will make room in my binders for other cards I’d rather have in pages.
I don’t have a good way of organizing smaller sets, such as regional or food issue cards. Some are organized by year; others are filed in miscellaneous binders. And I have several binders that are so full they are practically bursting.
Like any good “New Year’s Resolution,” this is going to be a yearlong project, and not just a quick fix one weekend. Wish me luck.
Note: This article is an updated version of an editorial that originally appeared in Volume 4 – Issue 3 of the Puck Junk Newsletter. For stories like these, plus news and updates about hockey cards and collectibles, subscribe to the newsletter here.
Love hockey? Join the Puck Junk Facebook Group, listen to the Podcast, subscribe to the Newsletter and YouTube Channel, and support this site at the Online Shop.
Follow Sal Barry on Bluesky @PuckJunk and on X/Twitter @PuckJunk. ■
Related Posts:
