Collecting Obscure/Scarce/Under-appreciated sets - Does it affect your enjoyment?

[NiceDocter]

I have always enjoyed the unusual and off beat items. What fun is it to collect something everyone else already has or is easily available on line any time you want it? For this reason, I was never interested much in T 206 cards (from childhood on) and like many here have only owned maybe 20 or 30 in my life. I kinda looked at them as "commons" back in the day in the first part of my adult collecting in the late 1970s and on...... although I do understand that there are some tremendous rarities in backs and conditions...... if you want a real laugh, I always kind of looked at Old Judge cards in the same light!!!! To each his own, but I still get much more of a kick chasing down something Ive never seen before ...... if you an obscure set collector it almost goes without saying that you eventually branch out into other areas and pretty soon (like so many people here I am willing to bet) you've got your wife or mother or girlfriend saying.....WHY DONT YOU JUST OPEN UP A STORE???? Boxes of stuff everywhere!!!! but enjoying it!!

[aljurgela]

... could be categorized as obscure. I think that in my entire negro league / Cuban card collection, there are just a handful of cards that have MORE than 20 copies grade and most have less than 10. For me, it has been a practice in patience and excitement when one of the cards that I have been looking for finally becomes available... or is seen for the first time. To each his own, but I love to try and find out where EVERY copy of a card that I owe is located, a task that would be nearly impossible for nearly any T206 card outside of, perhaps, the Wagners. While the tribes that I belong to in these small niches are small, they are extremely passionate, as am I.