Mission 10k

First of all - thank you all for celebrting this blog's anniversary. Your posts and comments made my day, and it was great to see so many bloggers stop by. 

And it was a blast to see this on the blogs! That was exactly what I'd hoped for. Thank you! 😁

So...now that a few more bloggers have discovered (or re-discovered) The Collector, let's discuss a sport very few of you collect. 

Basketball cards! 

The first time I visited Card Cave Central I didnt have a lot of time to peruse the dollar boxes so I skipped basketball altogether. Then last weekend I made a second trip - mostly to pick up a four-row monster box that they of course were sold out of.. but also to look through the b-ball boxes. 

Before this blog started I had less than 100 basketball cards. In what may be the most tangible impact of blogging, I began to build a decent collection from scratch thanks to the generosity of many current and former followers of this blog. As of Friday, I had about 8,200 more basketball cards than I did ten years ago:

Spending Saturday afternoon at the Card Cave yielded two big stacks of (mostly) basketball cards, including a Marcus Camby auto and lots of shiny. 

I like collecting Brook Lopez, Jrue Holiday, and UConn alums like Caron Butler - but they aren't quite PCs.

These guys are my PCs. I'm now up to 116 different Hakeem Olajuwon cards, 92 different Reggie Miller cards, and 40 different Khris Middleton cards. 

These seven Damian Lillard cards bring my total to 52. Dame is now the ninth member of my own personal 50-card club. As for my total population of basketball cards.. 

I'm now within 1,600 cards of 10,000 total basketball cards. I definitely want to try and reach that goal by the end of the year. I'm only working on one NBA set so I might have to just keep adding random parallels like this, or boost my player PCs a bit more. 

Or I could go back a few decades. I have very few cards from the pre-Fleer era; many of the vintage cards I do have were a Secret Santa gift several years ago. This Jamaal Wilkes fits right in with that 1977-1982 Topps batch, while this wax-stained Chet Walker is now the oldest basketball card in my collection. I know almost nothing about 1960s-1970s NBA players who werent top-tier legends but I remembered Chet from researching my All-Time Teams project (which I might write out next year, if there's interest). I almost bought a card of another All-Time Teamer, Zelmo Beaty, but it was too off-center. 

I'll have more goal-oriented posts in the next few weeks. Might be able to get to 50k baseball cards by the end of the year, but 20k football seems too far out of reach.

Overall, it would be cool to end my collecting career with a 150,000 card total. I'd need to add around 12k cards in four months and then add all those to TCDB. 3,000 new cards a month is probably unpossible unless I "find" a few thousand more in a thorough cataloging. 

Do you have your collection counted on TCDB? How many total cards do you have? What sport do you have the most cards of (I'm assuming it's baseball) 

Thanks for reading!

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