The Yount Collector 2017 Year in Review and 2018 outlook

Here we are another year gone.  This year marked a very low point in my collecting in just about every way I collect.  The biggest event was buying a new house.  Late in 2016 I pretty much boxed up most of my collection and moved it into storage so we could get read to sell our old house.  That took longer than expected, but eventually everything fell into place and we moved into a beautiful new home, or at least new to me, in early June this year.  What that meant was a lot more space.  In fact my wife was nice enough to offer up one of the larger spare bedrooms as an office/man-cave/studio.  That also meant I got to unpack, organize, re-organize, re-re-organize, stack, unstack, restack,  you get the idea.  It's taken the better part of the last half of the year to get the office to a point where I could find stuff.  My winter project has been going through my major collections, which include my player and team collections and finally using the tools that the Trading Card Database has to catalog those collections.  I've also been scanning and adding images of anything that need one on the database and that's been time consuming.  I have yet to fully tackle my Yount collection, but it's on the list.

I also took over a year off of eBay.  Both buying and selling.  I started to dip my feet back in this past September selling a few cards and I bought my most recent Yount autograph.  Most of my collection acquisitions have been through luck (opening packs), trades, the occasional justcommons.com purchase (which is now cardbarrel.com for those interested), and my annual COMC delivery.  Actually I would say 90% of my new Yount cards came from my most recent COMC delivery from their Black Friday event.  I had been picking up Yount cards all year.

Last year, by my count and Beckett's, Robin had 139 new cards released.  Many of those were 1 of 1's and very low numbered, but there were still quite a few base cards, inserts, and parallels to be had for a budge collector like myself.  I did not add the HITS Memorabilia cards for lack of a decent checklist and product description.  I'm still not sure if it's just two guys in a garage cranking that stuff out.  But I also haven't taken a lot of time to look into their products, I've just seen a lot of their cards pop up on ebay. I did include the Topps Online 10x14 and 5x7 cards.

As it stands my collection stands at 1130 pieces.  That includes cards, magazines, drinkware, rulers, art, etc.  I've set a goal to get the collection to 1200, but I'm not worried if I don't make it.  I've always found it funny how we put milestones like hitting 100, 500, 1000 in such places of honor.  We humans like a our round numbers. 

As for the year to come.  I still plan on featuring individual cards from my collection on the blog.  I also plan on posting about and adding images of new Yount cards as they come out and adding them to the running 2018 checklist.  I really like the format I've got on the blog and I plan on keeping that up.  My goal is to still have every item on my collection page linked to a featured blog post and it's a project that's still years away from being complete if it ever is.  I would like to add at least one new Yount auto to the collection this year.  I follow a lot of auctions simply to track what prices are doing and it seems like Yount autographs have been dipping in price pretty significantly.  That's not to say that the old products and rarer stuff doesn't pull in decent prices, but I think Robin's autograph is now averaging about $30 a pop, down from about $50 from the past couple years.  And I ended up picking up my Leaf Q auto numbered to 15 for under $20.

I want to thank all the readers who stop by and occasionally leave a comment.  I'm not a writer by any means, but I do love to blog about my Yount cards.

With that said I hope everyone had a great holidays and here's looking to a great 2018!!