How have you gone about upgrading your existing collection

[Kurri17]

In my case upgrading is just a constant, regular part of my collecting. I am building the sets of the '70s, and I will pick high end copies regardless of them whether I have them or not, and if it is an upgrade I add it to the set or otherwise keep it as a trader, or in cases of cards/players/teams I specifically like I will add the extras to those collections. I have my '71-'77 collection of the A's that I collected as a kid, but always pick up nice copies of those to add and upgrade. Now that I talk about it, I'm not sure if its upgrading.....or hoarding.

[Volod]

When I started recollecting 1950's sets about forty years ago, the set I worked on first was the 1952 Bowman, simply because that was the deja vu set that I most recalled from childhood and that knocked me out when I saw the cards again at a dealers show I happened to wander into. Unfortunately for me, I became kind of obsessed with trying to get near mint examples of every card in the set, and even though they were relatively inexpensive at the time, it became an onerous task because the set is probably the most notorious of Bowman's issues for its frequency of poor registration. I must have spent a decade constantly upgrading cards that looked to be near mint until I found another example that had slightly better registration. Of course, I ended up with hundreds of duplicates, but I guess it was the kind of pursuit that only an obsessed card collector can appreciate.