Card shop trip

Bonus babies or cameo cards

You walk into a card shop and wish you can pick up unopened packs or boxes, maybe some singles - but then some times you get 'sticker shock' and decide you'd better be thinking about picking up something else.

Broken bat shots

Besides, there used to be this great site called Ebay, where at time, you can pick up some cards, but I digress - I must be a luddite because I don't actively use my PayPal account and Ebay has mandated sellers to do paperless transactions.

You are a little unsure if it is worth it just to go through a particular baseball card shop's common boxes, but part of the pilgrimage is digging through the commons boxes - I don't feel bad about putting some money into finding and picking up cards because I believe, I'm not spending some money to pick up cards of no value to me [at the very least].

Awesome action

I went through several monster boxes of commons and was able to get through parts of five different, random years - 2008, 2007, 2006, 2001 and 1997.

I ended up spending $20 to pick up 200 assorted cards from the commons bin - to add to my various 'personal' sets.

I had typed up a 'wantlist' I'd made up for the trip, but who organizes wantlists for collecting topic cards and various base cards [?] - these are my sets however. I don't collect to complete a set, but by the randomness of finding qualities among typically common cards.

Sometimes there is confusion with individual cards you have to think about - the most obvious cards I collect are image related and a bulk of my collecting topics cards consist of such cards.

If you do see a card that fits into one of the collecting topic classifications you are looking for, you need to grab it - I don't think any card is difficult to find, but there are so many card sets released each year. How do you find the ones you don't see because they were printed 10-15 years ago? It isn't a matter of scarcity or value, but just physically finding the cards in-hand when they are probably in mothballs.

Tools of ignorance

I'm admittedly anal about picking up the right number of cards and choosing different cards - but I ended up with doubles of some cards and later found I already had some cards I had picked up. I guess I get so excited at times to pick up as many cards as I can and I'm just not sure whether I have a particular card already.

Awesome outfield action

I hear checklists may help sort things out, but for as long as I've considered myself as a collector - I still need to figure how to be a 'nerd' and use a checklist for my benefit.