10 Years of Cardboard History

 Can you believe this has been going on for 10 whole years now? When I started Cardboard History back on November 22nd, 2014, I actually didn't expect I would be able to keep it going this long- I do have a tendency to start projects and trail off on them, never finishing them or even working on them again. 

But here we are in 2024 and I'm still going- even if I'm not "going strong" right now.

SO MUCH has changed for me in the hobby since I started this. Nearly everything has changed since I began this website, but while some of the changes I would prefer not to have had to make, overall I actually enjoy the hobby more now than I did back then. The most important changes:

• I didn't collect or watch hockey
• set completion was my only real goal
• I did not know how many different people I had in my collection
• I did not even consider a project of getting at least one card of every person to get one in my sports, because I did not even know it was possible to figure that out!
• I did not know how many cards I had
• I did not know what COMC was
• I had not been to a card show since 2004
• there were no local card shows to attend
• I did not believe I would ever get to a National
• I had not even envisioned the Cardboard History Gallery yet
• I did not own a card from the 1800s
• Press Pass still existed
• I was an avid Star Wars fan & collector
• repacks were readily available and my favorite way to grow my collection
• I had never opened a case of cards

Personally some pretty big things have happened since I began this too:

• I began a series of Adventures with my brother
• I have now visited 35 states (12 when Cardboard History began)
• I have now seen 3 of the 4 big man-made things that I consider the main things I wanted to see (Mt Rushmore, St. Louis Arch, Statue of Liberty)
• I got to enter a car show as a participant, achieving a lifelong goal
• I got to visit Roswell, New Mexico, something I've wanted to do since I was a kid
• I won a gold medal/1st place for my modeling, twice although I was the only entrant one of those times
• I got to see a cuneiform tablet in person, twice
• I got back to Lake George, my favorite place in the world. When I started this I was under the impression that I would not ever be able to return due to health reasons
• I walked around Manhattan and visited all five boroughs of New York City
• I got to the New York International Auto Show
• I completed my project of building one of every car number in 1/64 NASCAR Diecast that I began in 2005
• I returned to collecting 1/64 NASCAR diecast after having to walk away in early 2014
• I attended a pavement/road course race
• I saw a professional basketball arena in person
• I was named Head Automotive Judge at my club's scale model show
• I got a smartphone
• I took my first boat ride 
• I got a permanent modeling workspace

Obviously, for this website, becoming a hockey fan and collector is probably the biggest change. Since I got into hockey, it has become a part of every single day of my life, and going forward it surely will be. Even when I am not working on card stuff, I'm still watching hockey pretty much all the time. 

Creating the list of all the people in my collection was one of the first things I did after I started Cardboard History, circa 2015, and that would become one of the major driving forces of my collection, especially as my unhappiness with what Panini produces has led me to shift my focus from set-building-above-all to my Names Project, the somewhat clumsy name I've been calling my project of getting at least one card of every person to get one in my three major sports I collect. I've mentioned it before but that project feels more like being an actual historian of my sports than just focusing on base sets did. 
I actively seek out cards of people I don't have yet. For me, when I open packs, I am not chasing hits- I'm chasing my first card of somebody, anybody. When I am at a show or shop, whether I have a card of that person or not is often my deciding factor in which cards I buy.

Even though I don't actively collect baseball or football, or other miscellaneous sports, I still get a thrill when I get some cards from those topics and it's a new person not yet represented in my collection. At the time I'm writing this, I currently stand at 17,828 people listed, although there are a couple of names that I can't actually track down a card of them at the moment- I suspect that they are typos of people in sports I'm not knowledgeable, or come from the Sports Illustrated for Kids cards that I've misplaced since I wrote the list of who was in my collection back in 2015. It's probably closer to 17,775 people if it turns out they are all typos or mistakes.

One thing that has almost completely dropped off is my project of getting at least one card from every major set. I still care, I still document it, and I will still grab a card from a new set if I'm going through a stack at a show/shop, but the importance of that has dropped off significantly, for two main reasons- one being that the Names Project has surpassed and replaced the Sets Project, but mainly because after I went through and bought an example of almost every set on COMC for NBA, it took away almost all the fun of getting a card from that set naturally- not as a single. It happened several times and the best I can put it into words is that it made it anti-climactic. The joy of getting a missing set naturally was taken away by my efforts to force it. I've actively NOT done that with hockey since I started collecting it for the most part. I have hunted down some vintage cards, but those are sets I know I'm not likely to find locally/get in trade. I do have a list of the sets I don't have for hockey, but I'm not actively going and just buying the cheapest card available for the set like I did for NBA. I feel safe to say I will in fact never do that again, neither for the NHL or the NBA sets that have come out since I did that. 

One thing that has not changed has been my love of scanning cards. That is still one of my favorite aspects of the hobby, and the labeling and uploading them is, in fact, more fun for me than actually adding the cards to my collection. The scanning project- which I originally estimated I'd complete in 2016 (!), led to the creation of the Cardboard History Gallery, which is my actual favorite part of card collecting. I launched it on my birthday in 2018 and I finally finished building it in late 2022. It is my website where every single set, season, team, person and subject has it's own album. Want to see what I have of any person? Simply look up their album. Want to browse a team's history from the earliest days to the present? I can do that. Want to look through all the Marvel Cinematic Universe cards? I can do that too. Of course every single topic has more cards waiting their turn to be scanned. The scanning process is fairly slow, but I do enjoy it so I don't mind. 

Doing my monthly upload- which I begin on the first of every month - has become my driving force in the hobby, and most fun thing. Seeing how the numbers in each album grow, seeing the newly scanned cards automatically slot into place (a service provided by my web host), seeing how long it's been since I've scanned something new for any random set, seeing how many new people I scan in each month- I love it all. One thing I didn't even plan for but has provided me lots of enjoyment has been seeing if a scan makes it onto the first page of team albums. I don't know why that brings me such enjoyment, but it does. Building the website, in all honesty, brings me more enjoyment than actually adding the cards does, as I said. The website updates have made getting the cards more a means to an end rather than the main focus. 

I do not know what the next ten years will bring. I do know I will still be in the hobby, and I will still be doing at least one post a month as I document who I get scanned for the first time. Where will my collection, and my adventures take me? I don't know. I could never have imagined taking on an entire new sport when I started this thing, but now it's a major part of every day. As I type this I am watching a hockey game, and I can see more than a dozen hockey cards waiting their turn to be scanned. 

Will I have completed scanning everything? It's hard to say. If I stopped adding new cards I would say likely, but the odds of me stopping adding new cards are 0 percent. I fully expect NHL to overtake NASCAR by the end of this decade, let alone 10 years from now, if for no other reason than there are more of them available. (The NHL gets multiple 500 card sets a year, NASCAR gets 1 200 card set and that's pretty much it. Plus, hockey still has thousands upon thousands of cards from the past I don't have yet). I could even see it happening by the end of 2025 at my current rate of adding cards to my collection. 

My ultimate goal is still to have a museum and hall of fame for the hobby. I do not know if I can ever make it happen for money reasons mostly, but it's all working up to that. If I can pull it off it would be the greatest and largest thing I've ever done. I just don't know if I have the funds and wherewithal to pull it off. Only venturing into the future will find out. 

Finally, I want to say thank you to all my readers, and especially those of you who leave comments. I didn't expect to get readers, I figured this would be more just something to help me not forget what I was doing, but I really appreciate those of you who have stuck with me, have enjoyed what I have to say, and make it feel like I'm not just "screaming into the void". I can't say for certain but there's a good chance I would have lost interest if there wasn't a small but vibrant card blogosphere. 

On to the next decade of Cardboard History!