Another pack of 2025 Stadium Club, for some reason

 I have to stop buying this nonsense because I pull nothing I want.

I don't understand the theme of this insert set. In case of emergency break glass? Is he like a guy who comes off the bench to pinch hit a lot, or something? There are so many insert sets in the hobby that make so little sense to me. Like, if my job was to come up with baseball card set themes, this one would never have crossed my mind. It's also really ugly. Who collects these?

Ohtani base card. Canada is probably the only country that loathes Ohtani. I wish him nothing but the worst. I find the hype around Ohtani and the Dodgers amusing. It's fun to be a fan of baseball when baseball feels relevant again, if only briefly. But the Dodgers are just the west coast Yankees, and I mean that in the worst way possible. Every sport needs villains, though.

Some pink cards. I like pink cards. It makes me want to make a binder of Blue Jays parallels based around colour themes, like all pink, red, blue, etc. I like pink because it feels about as countercultural as baseball cards can get, unless they started doing LQBTQ or Trans flag coloured parallels. Which I wish they would do, because the fuck I want with camo coloured Jays cards?

Based on this card, too, Corbin Carroll hasn't quite figured baseball out yet. But really, who has?

 And this is the stack of base. I didn't get much in this pack. Whatever. I keep saying this, but I think I am done with opening new stuff because the hobby boxes and packs are unaffordable and retail is just filler nonsense. If it was easy to trade with people, it would be fine because I could trade all of this stuff for Jays cards. But it's impossible to do that these days because of international shipping costs, and everyone in Canada collects Jays. So into the junk box this stuff goes.

 Sometimes I feel like I ought to just be collecting cards from the 20th century. I collect comic books, and I don't buy nor do I read anything from after about the early 90s. My preference is for stuff from the 60s through the 80s. I also collect old video games, but again just stuff from the 80s and 90s. I also collect wrestling stuff, but again just 80s and 90s.

I guess the only reason I don't do that with sports cards is that I follow modern sports, so it's fun to collect modern players on my favourite teams. But often I get the itch to just get rid of all my cards from 2000 and on and just focus on vintage and early modern. 

I guess the other reason I don't do that is that most of the Toronto teams are modern expansion teams. Like, I would love to collect Jays cards from the 50s, except the Jays didn't exist then. Or 80s Raptors cards. Non existent. People who are fans of classic baseball or basketball teams can go back many decades and collect amazing vintage stuff. But unless you collect hockey cards (don't get me started), if you collect Toronto sports teams you end up collecting modern. Maybe I should just bandwagon the Dodgers or the Yankees, I dunno. Actually, I would love to have a collection of Brooklyn Dodgers cards, truth be told.

 Anyway, that was Stadium Club. God save us from Stadium Club. 

A big, fat pack of Donruss Soccer

I bought a fat pack of 25-26 Donruss soccer cards for a weekend rip. My favourite part of this pack is how Gamestop stuck the price sticker right over Messi's ugly little troll face. 

I buy packs a lot at Gamestop (which is called EB Games in Canada, although it used to be Gamestop, and before that it was EB Games again, just for fun I guess) because nearly all of the real hobby shops around here only carry hockey packs or horribly overpriced boxes of sports other than hockey. I just want to waste my money on retail junk, rather than wasting TONS of my money on hobby junk.

 

I'm not familiar with a lot of the subsets or inserts in this product. I'm also less familiar with soccer than with baseball, basketball, or god help me, hockey. But I am MORE familiar with soccer than with football. But I am less familiar with soccer compared to wrestling and boxing, but MORE familiar with it compared to basically any other sport. Soccer ranks anywhere from my third to my fifth or my fifteenth or my first or my most or my least favourite sport depending on the day of the week and my mood. Confused yet? Imagine how I feel. Anyway, my point is that I don't know what these cards are, or who these players are.

 I'm familiar with Declan Rice. I also enjoy how ugly these Donruss cards are. Donruss has always had ugly cards no matter who made them.

Well, this one isn't too ugly. I'm not sure what "Zero Gravity" has to do with soccer. Seems more like a theme meant for a basketball set. Even baseball, for like home run hitters. Who is Nico Schlotterbeck? Is that even a real name?
 

This dude has a Greek name, but plays for Switzerland. One design aspect I like about Donruss is their "Rated Rookie" logo. It's always looked good.

 These are Chrome. I think? Maybe Holo. I dunno. I have to look it up. But the card stock is shinier and more premium than the other base cards. Panini doesn't bother writing on their card backs what their cards are, so it's up to your imagination. Also, Panini's card backs fucking suck. Like, they make the worst, most boring, plainest, laziest card backs in the history of sports cards. They rarely even bother with stats, or a photo on the back. Fuck Panini. And while we are at it, fuck Fanatics, too.

 I guess this is a pretty good pull for a retail pack. Cristiano Geraldo. This is some sort of parallel of Geraldo. Maybe a Holo Prism? How about a Prism Wave? Maybe a Silver Wave? It's something, anyway. Maybe it's worth money? Again, it's up to your imagination.

 This is the stack of commons. You know, I like commons. The more "investors" in sports cards hate them, the more I like them. The more these dorks looking for "hits" and "gem mints" and all that shit, the more I hope they pull nothing but commons for the rest of their lives. 

I think the card companies should do reverse hit packs. Like, for $1,000 you have a chance of getting a hit in a pack, but you also have a chance of pulling like ten commons from 91 Donruss. I would love to see a video where some dude drops like $5,000 grand and pulls nothing but a pile of 91 Donruss. Get these people out of the hobby, post haste.

Anyway, those were soccer cards. 

I bought the Blue Jays Topps team set

 I don't usually buy team sets of base cards because whatever, but this year I made a new year's resolution to spend my money poorly and decided it would be fun to chase as many Blue Jays cards released in 2026 as I can.

This is Eric Lauer. He was recently DFAd, which is the big league baseball version of getting fired on a Friday afternoon. Lauer has really stunk this year and despite that also complained to the media about starting behind an opener. Well, when you suck, the manager is going to play you against the top of the other team's lineup as little as possible. But don't feel bad, Eric. Sometimes I feel like a walking DFA.

 Berrios is one of a jillion Jays that has been injured. I don't believe he has played at all this season. Our pitching has stunk, so we could use him. Assuming he doesn't stink, too.

I haven't seen much of Estrada. He's been back and forth between the Jays and their farm team in Buffalo. I dunno why he even has a card as opposed to other, more popular Jays. I guess because he's a rookie, but whatever. A lot of popular Jays were missing from Series 1.

Varsho has been one of the few Jays that has been fairly consistent and hasn't gotten hurt. He's not the most exciting player, but he did make a cool catch the other night where he ran full force, face first into the outfield wall. Perhaps he forgot it was there.

 Barger was hurt, came back, got hurt again. I feel like a lot of the injuries might be a hangover from the Jays sacrificing their bodies to get to the World Series, because they played hard and now they are paying the physical toll for it in the new season.

 I fucking hate these red uniforms. It completely screws up the colour scheme the Jays have going with blue and white. It also sucks that Topps printed Vladdy's card with him in the red uniform, as obviously lots of Jays fans (like me) collect him and we have to look at this blood red nonsense. It looks awful in a binder next to other Jays cards. They should save this uniform for one of those stupid alternate photo parallels and have flagship Topps feature players in their team's flagship uniform. Right?

Gausman had a bad night the other game, but has been one of the few consistent pitchers this season. I also absolutely hate the City Connect uniforms. I love the design of the Toronto skyline, but the colours are hideous and you can barely see the design with the colour palette they chose. It's ugly.

 Who the fuck is Joey Loperfido? He was traded away in February. I really don't understand some of the choices Topps made with this checklist. Obviously they couldn't have known he was traded, but he wasn't really a guy that needed a card anyway.

 

Kirk is another guy that has been hurt. He broke his thumb or something. We miss his bat.

 Nice photo of the Jays celebrating. Ernie Clement is in the foreground, and is one of the most popular Jays and one of the few having a good season. Maybe he should like, have a card here or something?

 This is what the first nine cards look like in a binder page. There are ten cards, which means Gausman sits alone on the second page. Why can't Topps or whatever company do these things in multiples of nine? They know us dorks are going to put this stuff in binders. I don't get why they can't do team sets in nines, subsets in nines, insert sets in nines. That way, you get a full page for each obvious theme. The modern card companies are so horribly anti-consumer in so many obvious ways, it's quite astounding. But then again, most companies I find are now hostile to their own customers, so why should baseball cards be any different.

 There you go. Flagship Jays. Half of them shouldn't even have a card, but it's not like I'm a fan of the team or anything.

A Saturday afternoon visit to the local card shop, now a fantasy investment brokerage

 Over the weekend I visited a local card shop here in Toronto for the first time. It's called Relikks and it's located somewhere in midtown on Yonge Street. I was surprised I hadn't bother going before because it ended up being just a quick subway ride from my apartment downtown. But I walk everywhere and try to avoid public transit as much as possible, so anything that doesn't exist within a half hour walk of my apartment doesn't exist.

But it turns out Relikks does exist, and I enjoyed the visit. It's a small shop that is well-designed, mostly focusing on high dollar cards and new wax. That's pretty typical of card stores these days, as "collectors" are burning through money to buy as much expensive stuff as possible even though little of it is going to hold value.

They did, however, have quite a few $5 boxes. Actually, tons of them. Five bucks is about the best you can ask for these days in Canada. I ended up going through some of the boxes. They were organized by sport, but the problem is they were totally random, so if something said "$5 Baseball", then you literally had no idea what was in it. And they had dozens of these boxes and really nowhere to sit and go through them carefully. Still, sifting through stuff like this is fun.

I love Court Kings, as the cards are gorgeous. It's really too bad Panini doesn't have an NBA license anymore. Not that I want them to have an exclusive license, but my preference is always for competition in the marketplace. Capitalism doesn't really work with exclusive monopolies. It kinda defeats the purpose of capitalism, actually.

I got this for about $15. It's part of the Water Color insert set from one of the recent Court Kings releases. I'm not sure which one, and it doesn't matter. Dr. J is cool and this is a lovely card, so an easy buy for me.

This is the 89 Hoops Jordan. Ten bucks. I always hated the Hoops cards from 89 and especially 90 back when I was a kid because they were everywhere. But they've kinda grown on me over time, even though they are basketball junk wax. But a Jordan is a Jordan no matter.

Speaking of Jordan, here he is with Scottie Pippen discussing their investment portfolios. This is from Upper Deck Collector's Choice from some year in the 90s. I don't keep close track of my cards, so I have no idea which year. Tracking like that is too tedious for me. I think this was $5.

 Kyle Lowry purple something-or-the-other parallel from NBA Hoops, maybe from 2018 or 19. I think it's purple disco or whatever, but it looks pretty. This was $5. They were really picked over for Raptors cards and had almost zero Jays, which is the problem with buying Toronto cards locally because literally every single person in this entire country is a fan of the same handful of teams. Life would be easier if I collected like the Sacramento Kings and San Diego Padres or something.

A Jari Kurri rookie from 81-82 O-Pee-Chee. I know hockey cards from before 1990 by heart, so no need to guess at which year this is. It's off-center top to bottom, but I don't care. The corners are sharp. It was $15. I find a lot of vintage stuff isn't scaling in price as much as modern stuff, as the Zoomers don't seem to give a crap about anything from the 20th century and they are driving much of these prices now. I'm mostly the opposite, as you'll notice that most of my modern pickups are of players from back in the day. I grow old with each passing day.

They also had this cool rug. I want one. Problem is that I have a fuzzy cat who has white fur and this would get matted with cat fur within hours. She's a fur factory. 

One thing I do want to mention, too, was the experience of being in a modern card shop on a Saturday afternoon in the lord's year of 2026. I don't go into too many card shops, as they are mostly located where rent is cheaper and rent in Toronto costs a pound of flesh monthly. It was full of kids, teenagers on down. The people working behind the counter were all teenagers. Lots of teens looking for Pokemon and One Piece. I'm familiar with Pokemon, but don't care about it, and I still have no idea what One Piece is. Some sort of anime, I guess? 

Anyway, there were a few middle-aged guys. Some were with their kids. One I want to talk about was someone I observed trying to help his son, who was no more than 8 or 9 years old, decide between buying a Cooper Flagg rookie or a Wemby parallel of some such. Both were about $100. I remember for my birthday I used to get one comic book, and I don't think it was even this kid's birthday. 

Anyway, the guy asked the teenaged boy working the counter which was the better purchase and the kid told him the Cooper rookie. The man then went into a long series of questions about long-term value, grading, the card market, that sort of stuff. He was asking the teenager all kinds of questions about grading the card in a few years and whether the value will hold up and which cards are best for investment.

Think about this. This was a grown man, buying an expensive card for his little boy, asking a teenager for investment advice about basketball cards. Who the fuck asks a teenager for investment advice? Who the fuck asks a teenager about anything? The kid has barely been on this planet all of 15 years and he's gotta answer some old guy's questions about collectibles speculation.

I thought this was weird, and probably a one-off. That is, until another even older guy came into the shop and was asking the teen about hobby box values. He wanted to buy the one that would give the best value for autographs. The answer to that is obviously none of them. He was looking to make an investment in autographs. Huh? This guy really grilled the kid, too, like the kid was an insurance agent working on commission.

This is the state of the hobby this decade. It's people who have never collected, or maybe remember collecting back in the junk wax era as kids, who are dipping back into it with the hopes of making money. The first guy with the little kid suggested to his kid that they will hold the Cooper rookie for a few years and then submit it for grading then. Fuck if the hobby even exists in a few years. Will anyone really have this much discretionary income by the end of the decade?

Look, sports cards are not an investment. They never, ever were and never, ever will be. They are rank speculation. Yes, you can make money from them. You can also make money betting the ponies or buying scratch tickets, but no one calls that investing. 

If sports cards were an investment, you would benchmark them against something like the Dow or the S&P 500 and then if the return on your cards is greater than that benchmark, you would take into account things like liquidity risk, volatility, and transaction costs. Even if you get lucky and put together a small collection of valuable sports cards that end up being a better "investment" than the S&P, if you factor in how hard it is to actually sell cards right away for their best value, how that value fluctuates wildly, and how platforms like Ebay, COMC, etc, take tons of money in fees, then even if you end up ahead of the market, it might not be enough to make sports cards worthwhile.

And even if it was enough, you would then have to compare speculating in sports cards to the returns and risk factors of other speculative investments. Things like stocks, real estates (REITS), options, commodities, other collectibles, etc. There are tons of nonsense to speculate on just in the financial markets alone. Do sports cards out perform any of those speculative vehicles, at an acceptable rate of risk? Do your sports cards? 

Man, just think this stuff through rationally. Being someone who just wants to collect cool looking cards of players and teams I like is such a weird experience. I feel like there are like five of us left doing this as a hobby, and countless who think they are going to get rich. Do these people not realize every single year there is another hyped rookie whose cards are going to be priceless in the future? Literally every single year. Going back decades. How many of these rookie cards have held up in value? I'm old enough to remember people hoarding Eric Lindros Score rookie cards, thinking these were going to be worth tons. They aren't worth shit.

This bubble will burst, as bubbles all do. I can't wait. I'll buy that kid's stupid Cooper Flagg rookie for ten bucks in ten years. Happy birthday. 

A pack of 2025 Stadium Club, for some reason

 Yes, I'm alive. If you are bold enough to call any of this living.

My poor baseball card blog has been ignored in favour of a new job I started in April, which has left me exhausted after many months of wretched unemployment. I don't know which is worse.

But now I find myself on a quiet Saturday night with a fat pack of 2025 Stadium Club. I decided awhile ago to stop ripping new wax for all the regular reasons, which of course means I am going to continue ripping new wax. Like a smoker, I'm just having one more.

 $12.99 is in Canadian money, so don't worry. I spend my money poorly elsewhere.

 For some reason Fanatics is still releasing 2025 baseball products while they are now releasing 2026 cards. I guess releasing cards on time isn't a priority for the new ownership of Topps. A lot of things are not a priority for the new ownership of Topps. Certainly not the customer.

 

 

I was prepared to hate this set because I had seen mostly negative reviews online. I was surprised to enjoy it. I really like the pink parallels. They look gorgeous and the colour really pops. I'd like to get some Blue Jays pink cards. And is Justin Verlander still with Kate Upton?

 

 

A sepia tone Mark McGwire. I don't like this one as much as the pink cards. It might work better for cards of prewar players because it gives off an old-time photograph vibe. 

 

I also guess the steroids era was long enough ago now that people aren't as pissed at McGwire and his cohorts as they used to be, so card companies can start printing their cards again. It's so strange how forgotten it is when Big Mac broke the single season home run record. It was a huge cultural event, and I still remember watching it live. It's pretty much completely erased from the collective consciousness. Wait, is there still a collective consciousness? 

 

A few legendary guys. Ichiro looks like he's 186 years old. Someone will have to ask him what it was like playing against Ty Cobb. Larry Walker always looks wrong in a Rockies uniform. I mean, I guess most players look wrong in a Rockies uniform, but Larry in particular looks wrong. I'm not a Braves fan, and Braves players from that era will always be villains in my mind. I enjoy using my birthday wishes to ask for grave misfortune for Braves players. John Smoltz is still on tv, so don't get upset because it isn't working anyway. But Dale Murphy not being a HOFer might be my fault.

 

 

 

A few Blue Jays to round out the post. The photography is good. Not as good as Stadium Club sets in the past, but still pretty good. They're still releasing cards of Bichette as a Jay even though he is persona non grata up here now. It was nice getting a few Jays, at least. It's a real pain in the ass collecting Jays cards in Toronto because literally everyone collects the same cards, so I can never find them locally, or have to pay way more than they are worth.

 

Anyway, that was my pack. What exactly is a stadium club, though? Is that located a level above upper deck? I have to imagine it's still a level below a skybox. I think these card companies ought to get together and figure out their architectural hierarchy. 

 

Overall, I liked these cards better than I thought, but I usually like Stadium Club anyway. I'm really considering giving up on modern cards altogether and just sticking to stuff from the 20th century. That's where I am at with comic books. I don't really relate to the younger, modern collector and their tastes, and I don't understand why anyone thinks any of this current stuff is going to be worth anything in a few years. But I'm an old man yelling at clouds, so best ignore me.

COMC is weird in 2026, but what isn't?

 I'm surprised I haven't gotten injured just watching the Jays this season. Maybe I have, and I'm in such bad shape I just haven't noticed.

 As the Jays deal with their World Series hangover, I have begun picking up new (old) cards to start the baseball season.

I uploaded my first credits to COMC in many years. I don't particularly want to use COMC these days and I buy most of my stuff from Sportlots, but the problem is that being in Canada there isn't a lot of choice when it comes to shipping. I can combine shipping with either COMC or Sportlots and send myself a relatively inexpensive package once every few weeks or so.

Buying from Ebay as a Canadian, however, is a miserable experience. I mean, I'm sure it's a miserable experience for everyone, but it's an even more expensive miserable experience for us north of the border. I guess I could use the COMC mailbox service, or another mail forwarding service, but I'm not sure if the added costs of those services greatly offset the amount of extra money I would pay just to have the cards shipped directly from the seller to my home. It's annoying.

COMC is weird. As I mentioned, I haven't bought anything from it in years. They seem to have never updated their web site. Most of their search options are useless. Same with their watch list. 

 It also feels like there are far fewer cards on COMC these days. I can see sales history for the cards I'm interested in, and it looks as if people are buying cards there and just pulling them off the site. Like, I can see a lot of cards had much cheaper copies, all of which sold, and now only the silly overpriced ones are left.

Yet another problem is that I make offers and sellers just don't respond. Why bother having the offer functionality if you are just going to ignore it? Turn it off. 

There seems to be a lot of competition now from similar sports card selling apps. The problem for me is that almost none of those apps allow for sales to Canada. I guess I could use the COMC mailbox feature again with those, but once again I'm not sure if the added cost is worth it because I have to pay to ship to COMC, pay COMC to store the cards, wait for them to upload them, and then mail them with the rest of my COMC cards. I'll probably try it once to see how it goes.

If I were one of these sellers that had portfolios with massive values at COMC I would be quite nervous about COMC going bankrupt or something. What would happen to my inventory? Is there something in the site's fine print that would prevent me from recovering my cards, or a cash equivalent? What if COMC's warehouse burnt down? Sure, they would get the insurance payout. What would I get? I don't trust them at all, and I wouldn't keep any cards on their site worth more than what I was willing to totally lose.

Are you still using COMC in 2026? Why or why not? 

1984 Topps proves I am stupid and here is why

 

I got back into The Hobby(tm) at the beginning of this year. Well, I guess at Christmas. I've been collecting cards and other nonsense off and on since I was a kid, owning my first hockey cards around 1989 or so. Like with my other hobbies, I've always dipped in and out, but even when I dip out I know cards are something I will return to at some point later. It could be in a few months or a few years, but I find my way back. I don't worry about it too much. Just a little.

Being a lifelong card collector guy, at this point I know what works for me and what doesn't. I know what gets me the most value, costs the least amount of dollars for the most amount of joy. It's really the same advice you see all the time. Set a budget. Have a focus. Be patient. Enjoy the process. Collect what you like. I mean, you can apply this advice to a large swath of your life and it would be apt.

 I used to really enjoy set building. There is fun in slowly completing a list of cards, adding them to a box or binder a bit at a time. One of other reasons I enjoy set building is that I don't necessarily care about having expensive cards, or stuff like that. I do like that stuff, but not because they are expensive. I also enjoy worthless cards, if there happens to be something about the card I like. Like the photography, the player, the design, just something. Building sets ends up being an excuse to collect a bunch of worthless cards and keeping them to a theme, which is the theme of the set.

The problem with set building is that you end up with a ton of cards. Like, a ton. They are difficult to store, to transport, and to sell if you decide you don't want them for whatever reason. It ends up being simpler to just select some cards you enjoy from each set and collect those. They don't have to be key cards or whatever. They can be anything you like. But there isn't much point in getting hundreds of cards when there's really only a handful of cards from a particular set that you really want.

The other thing with set collecting is that it is always cheaper to just buy the entire set. It costs a lot of money to collate a set a few cards at a time. The problem is that it is absolutely no fun whatsoever to buy a complete set that someone else built. Like, you get the set and think you will sit down and flip through it and enjoy it. But I find I never really enjoy it because it doesn't feel like "mine". I didn't create it. What I create belongs to me, and I have cheaply purchased someone else's joy at set building. You can't buy joy that way. It just doesn't work like that.

With that in mind, I decided to sell my 84 Topps set. It's the only complete set I owned by now. I had bought it complete in pages off Ebay a couple years ago or so. Owning it felt deflating. I had bought it because it's my birth year and I thought it would be fun to own the set from back then, and flip through it see what baseball looked like when I was a bouncing baby boy.

Yet, it wasn't fun. It just felt like I paid someone else to do the work of building the set for me. The pages sat in a binder for ages and I never looked at them. It's more fun to flip through these things with someone else who is interested in baseball from that year. To sit and flip through a binder of old Topps cards by myself makes me feel like I should be doing something else with my time. There is a difference between "collecting" and "collected". The hobby is about collecting, not about having collected.

I'm getting my collection down to a handful of cards on a few different themes, and then just focusing on those themes and that's it. So, like certain players, teams, stuff like that, with a focus on individual cards rather than completion. I like the idea of having a specific reason for each card I own and understanding why it fits into my broader collection. If I can't explain that, I can't own the card.

I listed the 84 Topps set on Ebay. It sold for $45, which is pretty cheap. It's in midgrade condition, but someone got a bargain. Honestly, I don't really care. I'm just glad someone else gets to enjoy it, since I wasn't.

Yet, there were a few problems. I listed it with free shipping, because if I had asked for shipping, I knew it would be ungodly expensive since I am shipping from Canada and the buyer is most likely to be American. In fact, the buyer did turn out to be American. What I didn't realize was that how expensive shipping would be. With the cost of shipping, Ebay fees, and the foreign exchange from US to Canadian dollars, my profit was $5 Canadian dollars.

Yes, $5 Canadian. That's like a wooden nickel in American money.

I should have just kept the stupid set, but I really didn't want it. I don't know where else to sell a complete 84 Topps set except Ebay. I know zero Canadians who want this. Maybe if I worked harder and posted the set on a bunch of Facebook groups for Canadian collectors, or took it to a card show I could have sold it. But that's a lot of work to sell something for just a few more bucks. I value money, but I value my time more.

What I should have done is not buy it in the first place. That's the lesson that sports cards teaches us, over and over again. That a fool and his money are soon parted. Often I buy stupid hobby stuff, be it cards, games, or comics, with the idea that if I decide down the line I don't really care for this item anymore, I can flip it and get my money back. It rarely works out that way.

 These days, it's even harder in Canada because of the difficulty buying and selling with the US. And the Canadian market is quite small, so if I decided to just sell stuff to other Canadians, I honestly wouldn't do much better because outside of hockey there just isn't much interest. If I did find a Canadian buy who was willing to pay more, like I mentioned it would take me so much more time and effort that I don't want to be bothered.

I am a rich man, but unfortunately I am rich in life experience and not in money. I would rather it be reversed. What my life experience in the hobby has taught me is to be considerate and intentional with your purchases in the first place. The cards I enjoy owning the most are individual, unique cards that I may have even paid a pretty penny for, but I don't care because the joy of owning the card is greater than its cost. Owning fewer things in life with each thing you own being more intentional is a good way to live, be it in the hobby or any other aspect of your life.

So, my motto going forward is to keep it simple, stupid. Emphasis on stupid.