What I Want Out Of 2015

As I sit here mindlessly watching the cursor on my screen blink, I've come to a realization that what I want out of the hobby will have to adjust for the next couple of years. My budget is going to be strapped for a bit, and to be honest, I won't truly know how it will affect my collecting habits until that time arrives.

That being said, I have put a little thought into how I can change my hobby spending habits and still enjoy the hobby. Gone are the times of buying two or three boxes of random products. In are the days of buying complete sets on eBay. Gone are the Bowman Rainbow chases on eBay. In are the days of working harder to acquire cards I want in trades.

With all of that in mind, here are my Top 5 Goals of 2015.

1. Limit box purchases to three. What I mean here is that I will limit my purchases to three products. Heritage will be in the 1966 design and I'm cool with that. I will buy 1 jumbo box each of Topps Series 1, Series 2 and Update. Lastly, I will buy a box (maybe two) of Bowman. Bowman Chrome is out and Bowman Draft may be a casualty of my limited spending budget, as well.

2. Host a 2015 Topps Heritage break. I enjoy hosting breaks. For me, it's fun to open the packs and interact with people as I do it. So I intend to keep that going with 2015 Heritage. The product streets Friday, March 6. Cases are currently selling for roughly $705, so that would put each slot at $55 (choose a team, get a randomly selected team) including shipping. If a case is too much, we could do a half-case and each slot would be roughly $30. So keep all of this in your mind if you're interested.

3. Increase my followers by 10 percent. Perhaps I set my hopes too high by wishing for 50 new followers in 2014. I'm going to take a different approach this year and shoot for a 10% increase in my follower base. This comes to a total of 9 new followers. Completely doable, right?!

4. Complete the 1982 or 1983 Kellogg's 3-D Superstars set. I've been contemplating this one for a while. I've come across many of these on eBay and read about them in one of Nick's posts. These seem to still be reasonably available and affordable. Each set has a run of 60 cards (I think that's the same for each set, not 100% on that one yet), so putting together a set should be doable in a calendar year.

5. Make significant progress on my player collections. Define "significant progress," you say? Fine. I want to add ten percent of the total cards from each PC to my collection, with Luke Jackson as the exception. This means that I need to add 8 cards to the Nick Martinez PC, 32 cards to the Matt Harrison PC and a whopping 78 cards to the Rusty Greer PC. Initially, I was concerned about the Greer cards, but then I remembered that Brian, a.k.a. Mr. Play At The Plate, probably has some doubles he would part with and Sportlots has a ton of singles for cheap. No worries there. With Luke Jackson, I define "significant progress" as knocking out most of his 2011 Bowman cards. I can do that.

So those are my Top 5 Hopes and Dreams for collecting in 2015. But that's not all I want to do. There are a few other things that I hope to accomplish during the year, but I won't count them against myself if I don't.

I want to see if I can put out the once-monthly newsletter that I talked about a bit ago. Daniel said he's interested in helping out, but I definitely need others since I will be starting grad school again.

I want to continue adding to my Bowman Autograph Project. I was able to snag the base auto of every Ranger featured in this year's Bowman, Bowman Chrome and Bowman Draft products, all for very reasonable prices. Next year should be no different, though the Rangers have the fourth pick in next year's draft, so that auto (assuming it is in '15 Draft) could be pricey. Also, I need to find a better checklist for the signors for the various Bowman products and update my list accordingly. I am pretty certain my list isn't correct.

I've said it  million times but have yet to act on it. 2015 will see me make it happen: I will make MCH more aesthetically pleasing. I will come up with a custom banner at bare minimum, but hopefully I will have a complete redesign of the page.

Though I doubt I will have the money, I would like to add a certified Bryce Harper auto to the collection. I would also like to add a Mantle to my collection (any Mantle - I'm not picky), but I don't know if I will be able to afford it.

And there are many more things I would like to accomplish. (I cringe at beginning that sentence with "And") Hopefully, these will give me a bit of a good start for the year. I think that perhaps my Top 5 are  a bit more realistic than last year's, which were made without much consideration. It has taken me three days to write this post and I have narrowed down many hopes into just five. All that's left is for me to make them happen.

Happy New Year, everyone!!!

(PS - If you think you might be interested in the Heritage break, it doesn't hurt to say so in the comments below!!!)