One More Pack

I’ve been a collector my whole life. When I was little my brother and I had just about every G.I. Joe made from 1983-1990. We had Masters of the Universe figures, Marvel figures, and Wrestling figures. I always have been a sports fan. I played organized and unorganized sports all growing up. Love watching football with my family and friends. Let’s Go Buffalo! And now I even work in sports. It seems only natural that I would have stacks of football cards. I still remember my brother having three of the 1987 Topps Randall Cunningham, and I never being able to pull one. Made me so mad.

I was away from #TheHobby for while through high school and college but once I became a productive member of society (read as tax payer), I jumped in again. Spent a few years 2001-2003 buying more cards and collectibles before I was laid off, went back to school, and made a career change. It took me a while to get back to collecting. But by 2015 I was back and I was all in. I started out with the Topps set. I was saddened to see it was the last of their NFL cards due to an exclusive contract between the league and Panini. I became obsessed with collecting the base set, including all of the variations. For another post.

I wanted a way to keep track of all my cards. And when I say all my cards, I mean every last card. Including the ones I considered valuable, to the cards I couldn’t give away with a quarter taped to them. I’m a geek at heart and have a bit of expertise in excel so I started to build spreadsheets. These spreadsheets allowed me to keep track of the cards I needed while set building and create card counts to see how many total cards I have. I’ve been slowly logging cards, it’s way more fun to rip open boxes and packs.
So now we sit here in 2020, my excels are quite elaborate. They are color coded, full printable checklists, and have easily calculated “need” lists. I don’t want to bore you all with the details of my excel geekiness, but I think they are awesome and keep me so organized. If you want to know more just ask me, I’ll explain and try to impress you with my spreadsheets all day long. I’d love to hear from some others out there on how they keep track of their collections.

With out further ado, the most resent numbers.
831 Jim Kelly Cards (439 unique)
620 Thurman Thomas Cards (306 unique)
233 Bruce Smith Cards (154 unique)
177 Andre Reed Cards (107 unique)
255 Buffalo Bills Hits (Autos, Patches, Numbered, Rookie Cards)

Let’s Go Buffalo!

91 Buffalo Sabres Cards (89 unique)
4,863 cards from 2012 Score
3,915 cards from 2018 Panini Football
2,727 cards from 2013 Topps
2,563 cards from 2015 Topps
1,593 total hockey cards
52,756 total football cards
54,349 total cards logged

I’m probably about half the way through logging all of my cards. I probably have 20,000 Pro Set cards from the late 80’s and early 90’s (Junk Wax Era!) I haven’t even begun to log my hits from other teams or any baseball, basketball, or non-sport cards. As you can see it’s a going to be a long project.

Today’s post is brought to you by a card I pulled from a box I bought at Target. It happens to also be his birthday. Happy Birthday Baker! Now go open one more pack.