Card Census: The Final Tally

Back in May, I began a sometimes arduous, sometimes gratifying task of counting my entire collection.  Not worried about absolute accuracy, though I am usually a perfectionist about things like this, I just wanted a rough number of the total cards I have officially in my collection.

Started out in stages.  I was worried about the bulk team collection, but it turned out to not be very tedious after all.  Ran into some other issues that slowed me down for a bit, but I pushed on.  The first report was in:

Total GU & Autos by sport  Baseball 11  Football 586  Hockey 156  Other 5

Total regular cards by sport:

Baseball 59190
Football 32742
Hockey 18117
Other 3742

Grand Total (so far): 114549

The first few posts were called Cardboard Census, but since the bots attack those posts, and I basically forgot about the title after it moved off the page in Blogger, I only updated the counts a couple more times.

Then I went on the six-state tour including the National, and piled up a bunch of stuff I couldn't put away until I was done counting, since what I bought would have added to what was already counted.  Then I also bought the 15 monster box hoard and sifted through that for a couple weeks.  Stay tuned for more about that later, but have your want lists ready!

Finally, this past weekend, I dove in again and finished counting the last part of the largest volume cabinet, the second binder shelf, and both desks that are covered in piles of incoming cards.

So to update the images from the last time:

The baseball cabinet bulk set storage and my player collection binders in the middle went relatively quickly.  I found a couple different techniques to get the numbers, which may appear in another Cardboard OCD post.

The football set binders went really fast, since they were mostly complete base sets.  The top shelf was done in like ten or fifteen minutes.  The Redskin binders took most of that time.  The third shelf is hockey (1889).  The other two binders there are Charlie's Angels, that counts with the non-sports stuff below, and the dead football leagues binder which contributed to the football number from the shelf above.

There were a small number of additions to this group on the sorting desk in the card room.  Not enough to warrant a re-take of the photo, though.  The stuff in the white box is from my latest Chantilly haul and was comprised of all three sports.

The desk in the other room held about twice as much incoming loot.  Sorted by sport, era, and set / team / player collections.  I can't wait to consolidate all this stuff.  That's basically the next phase of work I have to do.

It's all tracked and classified in my handy dandy spreadsheet.  I lumped all the game used, autos (certified and IP), manurelics,  and printing plates into a "hit" count.  Largely because they're not such a priority with me.

So here are my final (update: they are after the next post) numbers.  I'm not intending to keep a running count from here, but I may add in some more starter sets from the hoard, etc. just to keep it honest.  But like I said in the opening, I just wanted to know around what numbers I have.

+29 of my best cards - see next post

226,950 total cards as of Nov. 15 2019

I figured I'd approach 250,000 once I really got started.  Was almost going to be disappointed if I didn't pass 225K.  Not sure why.  The object isn't really to have the most, it's just to get stuff I like.  And I like a LOT of stuff.  This is what you get when you have no real life otherwise.

Now the question is, do I want to know how many cards I have in my house altogether?  Because none of this stuff was part of my totals...

The hoard - minus a few hundred

My bulk extras

Unsorted Redskins and set dupes

 

Spare sets and starters

Nah, I think I can live without knowing that number.  Now the quest begins for clean desk space again!