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!

Major, Major Milestone

 I knew it was coming but I didn't know when it would be. It was a long journey to get to this point, starting all the way back in February 1996. I knew I would hit it when I got my mail on November 8th, 2024, but I couldn't do it right away....the milestone? 100,000 unique NBA cards! 

Although NBA doesn't play as large a role in my life as it once did, it's still a big part. I'm still very actively collecting the NBA and I really wanted to get some of the Haunted Hoops set Panini made for this Halloween. I've been very critical of Panini over the years, but they did a great job with this. The cards are cheap, bright and fun, everything cards should be! I had to resort to Ebay to get my hands on a "box", which is actually just a really big pack with 40 more packs inside. They arrived to me on November 8th, but I had to scan them large pack before I could open the regular packs- and I had stuff on my scanner while I finished my monthly upload. I finally finished that on the 9th, and then scanned and opened the cards and entered them into my Excel collection chart, where I determined which card was #100,000. It turned out to be #40, Jusuf Nurkic. Of the 100,000 NBA cards I have, it is the 23rd of Nurkic. 

There were a LOT of new people to my collection in this box. NBA cards have gotten very hard to get locally, and almost all the players that have entered the league since 2020? About 60% of them were not yet present in my collection. This one box went a big way towards fixing that. Considering one of my main collecting projects ever is getting at least one card of every NBA player to get one, it was a big boost. This set also has photography from after the trade deadline of the 2023-24 season, so all of the players who got traded at the deadline or changed teams before the 2023-24 season appear with their new teams for the first time in my collection here too. I don't know how many people joined my collection for the first time yet, but I will soon, since I've pulled out all the new people to scan first. That will be revealed to me in full when I do my monthly upload starting on December 1st. I estimate it's more than 30 people in only 117 cards. I have enough cards now- and so many people, closing in on 20 thousand, that I can't remember who is actually in my collection 100% anymore, especially if I only have 1 card of them and it's not scanned yet. 

It's funny...back in 1996, my Mom gave me a pack of basketball cards as a gift for Valentine's Day, knowing that in my school, where she volunteered more than 10,000 hours, a lot of kids collected cards and I did as well, but I was collecting NASCAR and Non-Sport only...everyone else was collecting NBA. She got me those cards so I could have something with my friends to trade with. Later that night, I found a game on TV- Knicks and Hornets. I was hooked, and basketball cards became the biggest deal for me for the longest time, until I burned myself out in 2006. I returned in 2012, now considering the break I took one of the bigger mistakes of my life, but I am wise enough to now know that I will never fully walk away from something I love ever again, a lesson that needed to be learned the hard way. 

Of my friends who were collecting and trading back in 5th grade, I'm still in contact with most of them, at least loosely via Facebook...not a single one stayed in the hobby. I am the only one. 

My extreme, obsessive documentation started after I hit 25,000 cards...or at least when I thought I did. I didn't have the collection totals fully proofed and accurate until I finished typing everything in to my Excel charts earlier in 2024, but I'm counting it as accurate. 

A timeline of major milestones:

• 1st NBA Card- February 14th, 1996. 1995-96 Fleer #220 Sam Cassell
• 50,000th NBA Card - April 5th, 2003. 2002-03 UD Glass #75 Hedo Turkoglu
• 75000th NBA Card- February 14th, 2014. 2012-13 Panini Brilliance #175 John Salmons
• 100000th NBA Card - November 9th, 2024. 2023-24 Haunted Hoops #40 Jusuf Nurkic

Will this be the last Major Milestone for the NBA? There's the possibility that it is. Regular milestones are every 1000 cards, the next Major Milestone will be 125000. I simply don't add as many cards as I once did, my collection is advanced enough now that adding new cards isn't as easy, but the biggest hurdle is that they simply aren't making as many cards as they used to. I can't collect what doesn't exist. I don't enjoy the Chrome cards which is what the majority of Panini's current products are, and when Topps gets the license back in a couple of years, they are no better with making everything chrome all the time. Even if I got the complete flagship Hoops and Donruss sets every year, that's only 550 cards- and I've never completed a Donruss NBA set, and I have not completed a Hoops set since 2016-17, so the odds of that happening are slim, let alone every year. I am not trying to be defeatist or anything, but I'm just realistically thinking that it may not happen. Whether it does or doesn't I don't really mind. I've built a collection that even without my personal bias of it being mine, I think I safely say without hyperbole is nothing sort of incredible, not to brag. Looking through all the NBA history I've got documented on cardboard is without a doubt more comprehensive than the Basketball Hall of Fame, and documenting history is my main reason for collecting and truly doing everything I do- photography, model building as well. Writing this blog also comes from that- thus the name, Cardboard History. 

One weird thing about the 4 Major Milestones I have documented? 3 of them were purple based teams, with two being the Kings and one being the Suns. Not a single one of them was planned, all of them were from a pack that I opened. 

New People October 2024

 October saw a lot more scanning that I expected, with 958 cards scanned. Of them, 136 were new people.

There are some pretty big names in there, too, especially in the non-sport, music category. 

I also hit a pretty cool milestone. Miscellaneous sports hit 1000 people scanned! Of the 7 major categories, it becomes the 5th to reach the 1000 mark. Non-Sport, which I actively collect but doesn't get many cards, is the lowest number of people, with 817. Baseball has not hit 1000 scanned yet, sitting at 877 after October's additions, but will- I have more than 1000 in my collection, I just haven't scanned them all yet. My records show that I have more than 1300 different people for Non-Sport, so I guess I really need to get busy scanning them! (of course, I'll get to them whenever they come out of the boxes- it's more fun for me to grab a random box to work on scanning, then going and specifically looking for one) 

Although I don't know who the 1000th person to enter my collection for miscellaneous sports is, I do know who was the 1000th I uploaded into the album.

I have not a clue for sure, but I'd bet at least 50% of the people in the Miscellaneous Sports section come from the SI for Kids magazine, as this one did as well. I scanned three months' worth of the publication in October, providing 16 of the 17 people added in the Miscellaneous category. 

Here are the new people I added this month.

The largest contribution of new people came from the WNBA rookie set I ordered from Panini Instant, which was 14 cards. All of the NBA players and the single NASCAR driver came from the blasters my Mom gave me for my birthday. There is one obvious mistake that I need to fix here, in that William Fargo is listed as WNBA, instead of Non-Sports. William Fargo was one of the founders of Wells-Fargo, and got a card in the Pieces of the Past Historical Premium Edition that I got.