Digital Card Trading Part 2 "Hoarding"

The Topps Digital Card apps have become a big part of my life as I carry those apps on my phone with me
wherever I go. Which means I also get to carry my card collections with me everywhere as well.  Notifications let me know when new sets or new cards of marathon sets are released.  It is great!  I get to celebrate some of my favorite things from Star Wars, Marvel Comics, and baseball.  I get to share the fun of card trading with my kids with the Disney Collect app, and I get the sheer joy of cracking open packs in an app that doesn't necessarily appeal to me in the WWE SLAM app.  I still don't know why I collect those cards except it is just fun to open packs and see what's in there!  

I noticed a certain culture develop in the Star Wars Card Trader app pretty early.  It is a culture where people try to collect as many duplicates (or dupes) of a certain card.  This practice is called Hoarding.  I don't know why, but I found myself looking for a card that was my favorite to try to hoard for the fun of it.  If you take a look at my BATTLEJUMP SWCT account in the 2015 set, I attempted to hoard Darth Maul.  My attempt got me to 695 copies of this card.  I will say this is quite a small hoard as I have seen many card hoards in the upper 1000's, but I would not be surprised to see some hoards over 10,000.  This is a really interesting and in my eyes a fun and silly way of collecting.  For a few years and sets, I would find a card or two and start collecting as many as I could.  Then, I started collecting and hoarding teams.  One year I collected all the Rebels, then stormtroopers, etc.  Of course, the more cards I try to "hoard," the more difficult it becomes to accrue a large number of those cards without spending a ton of time trading.  

I have started using this concept of hoarding to try something new with my collection.  I don't actively go out and trade for as many of certain cards anymore (okay maybe a little), but I use the workshop to help shape and curate my collection.  For example, in my CYCLELIBRARIAN account in the current 2020 card sets, I am collecting as many of the animated (Clone Wars, Rebels, Resistance) cards as I can. 

Then, to get those cards to the top of my collection, I "workshop" any base cards that aren't animated to try to get those to drop below all of my animated cards, and when I look at my collection, I choose to look using the duplicates settings, so the cards with the most dupes are at the top.  

I know this is all pretty silly, but it makes for a fun way to curate your collection and it brings some fun to collecting "just" the base cards.  So, here is one more thing I am playing with the Disney Collect app.  In the base tier 1 collection, I have been able to separate my curated dupe collection from the rest of the collection by a large span of cards.  There is a 30 card separation between my top dupes and the rest of the collection.  So now using the Workshop, I'm going to start putting in order my favorites of the "favored" cards.  It is one more level of curation so that my very favorite card is at the top and then in descending rank they will show up by the amount of dupes each card has.  For example, right now I have 136 Kristoff cards, 128 Sven cards, 122 Elsa, 116 Olaf, and 107 Anna cards.  I would like Elsa and Anna to be at the top of my collection. 

So I will probably trade to get Anna's count up and then start workshopping Kristoff and Sven so they drop below the 122 count.  Wow!  That's a lot of work for Tier One cards, but, hey, they are Tier One so why not have some fun with "throwaway" cards now that I have the award for the set.  

What do you think?  Do you hoard cards in the digital card apps?  Do you hoard print cards?  What do you think of using the idea of hoarding and the workshop to curate a collection?  Leave a comment and let me know what your largest hoard or card count is.  Want to trade?  Check part 1 of my Digital Card Trading posts for the card apps that I am in and follow my user ID's.  Have fun!