Old Judge vs T206 from a small collector's eyes

[sandmountainslim]

I'm a small collector unlike most of the good folks on this board but I do have a healthy love of Pre-War baseball cards. My main collection (41 cards) is T206 because I love the history and they are affordable enough in low grade which to a single dad with a mortgage and tons of bills means a lot. I love to read the history of T206 and watch rare cards sell online and like everyone else I dream of finding a Wagner in a shoe box at an estate sale

N172 Old Judge and T205 are the other sets which catch my attention and cause me to do a lot of reading. I tried '33 Goudey and even bought six of them but for some reason that set really does nothing for me at all, I don't like the shape of the cards and the images themselves leave a lot to be desired in my opinion. T205 appears to be a set which sells for a bit more than T206 but it is smaller and still fairly priced so I can see in the future if I see some of the cards up for sale picking up some of them also and slowly working a bit on that set but OJ are another matter from what I have seen with even the common cards in very poor condition (skinned, faded etc) selling for upwards of a hundred bucks which I suppose makes sense based on their age and likelihood that most of them did not survive but it is still more than I can justify paying for a well worn example of a card. T206 was either produced in much larger numbers than OJ or the people of their era were better at preserving things. If an OJ in raw condition and poor shape sold for $20-$30 bucks I would likely have a dozen of them now but no matter how much I watch ebay hope for a bargain it never comes to pass. I bid on one this week at $40 and it eventually ended for 79 and I assume that will most likely always be the case so what I need to do is just concentrate on the White Borders and be happy with that and keep the OJ pipe dreams out of my OCD or just tell myself I can buy ONE OJ card as an example of the set and be done.

Sorry to have bored the board with my ranting/venting, I just had to blurt all that out to a group of people who could possibly understand my obsession and were I am coming from. My real life friends would think the whole notion is nuts