How have you gone about upgrading your existing collection

[MCoxon]

Originally Posted by jb67

I collect player sets and am continually upgrading. I remember being very happy when I would start a a player set and was always buying the PSA grade rather than the card. Now I have even sold off some higher end player cards to buy more lower grade but high eye-appeal cards.

Certain player runs I like low-mid grade cards that look great for the grade and I also have a couple of player runs that I look for the highest grade I can find with the eye-appeal that works for me.

I think one thing I have learned for certain is that my goals are always changing over time. Cards I thought I would never part with (because I was so happy to finally acquire it in a certain grade) have been sold to fund other purchases.

Bottom line is upgrading never ever ends and that is what is enjoyable about this hobby.

Very interesting. Also, I note you sold off some of your original purchases rather than keep multiples. Did you use eBay? To this point, I've never sold any cards...

Also, so far, when I have upgraded, I've used "variations" to get a better upgrade (e.g., 1956 white back vs. gray back; 1958 white letter Aaron; or an o-pee-chee version vs. a Topps version).

[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.

[jb67]

Originally Posted by MCoxon

Very interesting. Also, I note you sold off some of your original purchases rather than keep multiples. Did you use eBay? To this point, I've never sold any cards...

Also, so far, when I have upgraded, I've used "variations" to get a better upgrade (e.g., 1956 white back vs. gray back; 1958 white letter Aaron; or an o-pee-chee version vs. a Topps version).

Ebay will certainly get more eyes and I have sold most of my cards there but I have had a lot of luck selling on the baseball card forums as well.
O-PEE-CHEE is another beast and I have started collecting those for my Johnny Bench collection and really enjoy adding them. Very hard to find nicely centered OPC cards for my Bench collection so I will certainly be upgrading those for as long as I am alive

[Exhibitman]

I really don't upgrade except for a few sets or items, but I do look for cards from my childhood collecting era (1970-1981) at the National. I mostly go through deep discount boxes and grab as many different nice, sharp centered cards as I can find. There are tons of them available so the only trick is finding them clean, sharp and centered enough to satisfy my tastes. These are examples of the stuff I look for and spend a buck each or so:





I don't care about PSA holdering; these go in my albums. Visual appeal is paramount for me so a tiny technical issue is not a consideration. And as long as I'm only spending a buck or two each, I can buy one that's pretty nice, like the 72 Allen, and see if it improves my album or not, and if not, no biggie.

At this point I am down mostly to centering upgrades on the 1970s cards.

[frankhardy]

I am a Cardinals team set collector. I really only upgrade if it happens naturally... Like if I get some cards in a deal, I will always go through them to see if there are any Cardinals, and I pull them out. Since I always keep duplicate Cardinals cards and sell the rest, I just always put the nice card in my team's set album and put the lower grade card in the duplicate box.

I don't think I have ever upgraded a card on purpose. For instance, I have had my 1948 Bowman Musial rookie for about 14 years. It is low grade with multiple creases, but I am perfectly satisfied with it. If I happen to get a better duplicate sometime in the future, I will upgrade. But for now, it is perfect for me.

There is one other way I have upgraded a card. I also collect Topps regular and traded sets. I have 2016 down to 1965, which I just finished this week. A few months ago I needed a Steve Carlton rookie. I purchased a mid grade one, and I put it in my team set. I took the low grade one from my team set and put it in my complete set since my Cardinals team sets are my first priority.

[cesarcap]

Interesting reading.

I'm 50 so the cards I collected as a kid (75-79) are EX-NM-. Got entire sets: had a lot of beaters but it was just cheaper and faster to get sets from shows or ebay.

As for the older sets I have now built up, I generally had some of the key cards when I was younger. Some were beat up (62 and 69 Mantle) but I've now have built up VG or VG/EX sets.

My 57 set is a tad nicer since the Robinsons I had were EX/EX-. Have beater checklists though. My 60 set is even better. The key cards are PSA4-7.

It's great to have really nice cards. But I also LOVE my beat up 62 Mantle, which I traded my brother for a Charles Barkley F86 XRC. I LOVE my 69 Reggie with that faint wrinkle that you can only see when you tilt it a certain direction. Eventually I'll upgrade these but I'm into set collecting for the moment.

[MCoxon]

These are great stories, I really appreciate all the posts.

I am wavering on upgrading because I worry it's just one more step on my way to hoarding, vs. getting truly new, exciting cards. On the other hand, because I've limited my collection to player sets I'm starting to run down on available pickups. I'm wondering about doing what a few have posted about - going back to sets I first collected as a kid (which would be 1979-1983, baseball and football)...

I did take a step since I had a few days off this week - I went through my entire PSA-slabbed collection and made lists of singles to upgrade. It's never a good sign to commit to a want list in excel - with my personality it means I'm likely to get them.

[steve B]

My upgrading has been haphazard at best.

For years I'd buy cards that were not exactly in great shape. Except sometimes I'd get nicer ones. I just wasn't picky, so whatever seemed like a decent deal at the moment was what I bought.

Now I try to get nicer examples, especially of commons. And while I have some checklists/spreadsheets (The spreadsheets are just checklist grids) I don't bring them to shows or flea markets. So I get a few that I already had. I just compare and swap in the nicer ones. Occasionally I can't decide. Perfect centering but with a crease or bad corners - Or the one that has almost no wear but isn't centered. Sometimes I just keep them both.