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.
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My resolution is to get my 400,000 cards organized and get rid of extra cards. It’s going to take a lot of work but if my wife leaves me alone, I can do it.
Great resolution. Imagine how much you could get done if you had one full month with no responsibilities except organizing your cards 🙂
I Started the same type of project about a year and a half ago… Which led to me just concentrating on my favorite teams. Sabres for Hockey and Cleveland for Baseball. I also put a yearly cap on my baseball intake (per season), which got broken instantly so I just decided to stick to certain yearly set (Bowman, Topps 1,2 & 3, Topps Debut, Stadium Club and Heritage depending on how the year goes.
For my Sabres collection I was capped at ~100 cards for a bunch of years, especially after the UD Monopoly. That broke when Panini came in, and got reinstated after their license was gone. I kind of stopped around 2017 (Health Reasons) but upon returning in 2022… I completely blew that cap away without a blink. Other than the rule of 9s (binder page pockets) my aim is to have at least 1 card of every Sabres uniformed player released that year but not anywhere near every card released. Some sets I don’t even consider. Like the Punk Junk motto, I simply collect what I like. After the realization of going way over my limit and no plans on really curbing that in the near future, I went back into the years that were successfully capped and destroyed those limits. So the reorganization continues!!
BTW: If any one knows of a good was to off load a ton of cards that I’m no longer interested in please share. I don’t have the mental energy or time to do the eBay or the ComC thing for selling. I would even consider donating. eBay & ComC right now is strictly for acquisitions!
Hi Andre, thanks for sharing your story. The fun thing about collections and collecting goals is that they change over time. Back when I couldn’t afford a full set of cards, I would just try to get the Blackhawks or the rookie cards – even if they were of bit players. Once I was able to afford complete sets from the 1970s and 1980s, I no longer had binders full of “just” rookie cards. But now with the multitude of parallels and inserts, I try to just collect those for players that I like. For a while, I couldn’t collect everything, then I could, then I couldn’t again 🙂
I put all my cards in 800 count boxes and use dividers to keep the sets saperated by brand and year and some sets by team
That’s a neat idea.