Pre War Set advice

[glchen]

Since you're still unsure what set you want to collect, I would recommend collecting HOFer's since if you change your focus later, those cards will be the easiest to re-sell. (However, you should always make sure that you purchase for a decent price and not just buy BIN's from ebay. You can use VCP or check past completed sales on ebay for this.)

If you don't want to go the HOFer route because you are by nature a set collector, then I would take some time and just look through some of the pickup threads here (like Feb or March), and just get an idea of what kind of cards that you enjoy looking at. You can also go to other resources like Old Cardboard or even ebay and the auction house catalogs. When you narrow it down to a few sets that you think you would like to collect, then you can come back to the forum and ask the board what they think about these sets and how collectible they are? That is, are certain cards practically impossible to obtain because they are so rare or expensive or is this a good set you to collect? You can also think about if you want certain HOFers in the set that you collect. For example, if you want a Ruth card in your set, you should probably look at 1920s-30s. If you want a Cobb, then 1900s - 1910s might be better. The T206 is always very popular and as others have said, you don't have to limit yourself to collecting the entire monster, but can just look to collecting a subset. The 1933 Goudey is an nice set, but there are 4 Ruth's and 2 Gehrig's as well as the practically unobtainable Lajoie, so that set can become very expensive. Good luck in whatever you decide!