Five Tips To Building Sets
Building complete baseball card (or football, basketball, hockey, wrestling, etc.) sets has become a lost art in the 21st century.
(Cue grandpa voice) Back in my day, we used to take our spare change and ride our bikes to the grocery store and buy packs of Topps. No autographs, jersey cards, nothing. Just the potential to grab a hot Rookie Card of Gregg Jeffries.
There is still a faction of collectors out there that build "base" sets. For those that do not, or may want to begin this article is for you. How should you get started? Here are five tips to building complete sets the fun way.
1) The Old Fashioned Way
Also see: the most expensive way. Maybe your budget doesn't allow a purchase of an $80 box of cards. You can build through this old and arduous process by buying single packs and trading with your friends. You must note that there is a markup on single packs, so you may as well save that money and buy that hobby box. Single packs have become a lost art, and the budget way of buying cards has been replaced by retail blaster boxes. I wouldn't suggest this route unless you only have $5 to spare at a time and are a very patient person.
2) Breaking a Box
My personal favorite and an easy way to nearly reach your goal in one swoop. Most mainstream releases have good collation leaving you with minimal duplicates in a box. The plus to breaking a box and building a set is most of a return from breaking boxes comes from the "hits." If you get a great box you may be able to flip your hit(s) to break even on the box purchase, or even come out ahead. Many box and case breakers look down upon the base cards which leads me to number three on the list.
3) Buying Bulk From Breakers
This practice is almost as fun as breaking boxes on release night for me. Some breakers will sell off their base commons (sometimes even stars and inserts) on the cheap (penny per card). Set Filler Cards will often buy large flat rate boxes of base from the past three years for $30-40. Not only does this often give you a great start to building a set, it can often be several sets. And you never know, you may find some diamonds in these purchases. A recent flat rate buy at cost (of the flat rate box) yielded several Chrome rookies of David Price, Daniel Murphy, Ryan Braun, and Madison Bumgarner.
4) Online Trading
So many options are available for the card collector in 2017. The Internet brought us together in the mid-to-late 90's with the introduction of EBay pulling all closer together. Now we have message boards, Facebook groups, Twitter, etc. These avenues open us up to filling those sets by trading through the mail.
5) Buying Complete Sets
Well, this isn't a fun way, but if you are a volume set collector it can be the least expensive route. Complete sets through EBay auctions can be found really cheap at times. Sure, it takes the fun out of building a set, but if your goal is to maximize your collection with the least amount of expense this is the way to go.
How do you build sets? Let us know!