Well, you could just collect them all. Rent an office somewhere to store the millions of hockey cards in your ever-growing and never complete collection. Or, you could find your niche. Find some focus, find your niche and collect what you truly love.
1. Collect a specific set. Since this site is all about vintage hockey cards, the process involved in collecting a complete set of older hockey cards can be a challenging task. Of course, once the set is complete, there’s the quality tweeking that needs to be done. The ultimate goal is to have a mint condition set of cards.
2. Collect each card of a specific player. In today’s hockey card world (any player that played after 1990-91), this can be a daunting task because of the ludicrous variety of cards produced. To find all the existing cards of your favourite player, visit hockeydb.com and plug in that players name. Click the ‘List Cards’ button and you will have the full checklist. Don’t forget to collect the cardboard cameos of your player – these you won’t find in any handy checklist.
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3. Collect cards from a specific team. If your team is the Boston Bruins, collecting all cards between 1966-67 and 1975-76 will be an expensive ordeal. If your team is the Dallas Stars, do you include the Minnesota North Stars, Cleveland Barons and California Golden Seals?
4. Collect error cards. Everyone loves Guy Lafleur the defenseman or Rick Martin disguised as Gilbert Perreault. The great thing about focusing on error cards is coming across one that was previously undocumented.
5. Collect everything from a specific year. Once again, anything newer than 1990-91 involves collecting a lot of cards. What I’m getting at here is all the Topps and O-Pee-Chee from a specific year plus all inserts and subsets, plus any non-mainstream cards (Quaker Oats, Kraft, team issue, Coca-Cola, etc.).
6. Collect only rookie cards. Expensive, but really – aren’t the rookie cards the true treasures we’re all looking for anyway?
7. Collect the fluff. League Leaders, In-Action, Play-offs, Team Leaders, Team photos, etc. A lot of the time, these cards don’t hold much value – sometimes even lower than a common card. However, they can be the most informative and really quite cool.
8. Collect checklists. This is for all the librarians and accountants out there. They’re a boring list of names. Yet, because everyone through the years either marked them up with pen and pencil or simply threw them out, in a number of sets, these are now the most valuable cards.
