I also started collecting as a kid in 1987, but I was living on Ramstein air base in Germany so couldn’t buy packs of cards until I returned to North America in 1989.
Instead, I got into it by getting cards in trades for other things at the playground during recess from kids who had just arrived from stateside and brought their collections with them. In fact, for the first two years of my collecting life I wasn’t even aware that cards were sold in packs, they were just these things that the new kids had magically come into possession of somehow. It was hard to build a collection in that environment, two years of haggling on the playground netted me a random assortment of about 50 cards.
When I came back in 89 I got my first look at a card shop it just blew my mind. You mean you can just buy packs with 15 cards in them at a time? Or even whole sets? Crazy.
I then went through a really hard core collecting phase between 1989 and 1993 during which time my dad and I even started a little shop of our own. Then in 1993 he got transferred and we had to move again and I basically quit collecting at the age of 16 and wouldn’t pick it up again until many years later as an adult.
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