Zistle Time

Collecting on a budget means one thing.

Trading!

As well as the members of the 'UK Card' group on Facebook, The Dutch Card Guy from Holland and The Italian Completist I trade with members of the database and trading site Zistle.

Today my 10th successful trade arrived the America and I'm very pleased with it.

Last year (2015) I decided I'd start collecting baseball cards from the year of my birth so the 1968 Topps set was added to my wantlist.

My wife started my collection off (with help from a UK Cards member) as a Christmas present so 47 cards marked the start of my collection.

As the end of January, and payday, approached I decided I'd add some cards to my collection. The usual frustration with ebay and the high postage costs to England switched my attention to Zistle.

The easy to use 'Find Trades' guided me to 'Bumfan'. A quick check of this users profile showed as well as being from Washington State had successfully completed 20+ trades. As I always do I contact the user first to see if they are willing to trade with a collector from England. The higher shipping costs and associated risk is something that puts some users off and I have been turned down before for those reasons. Fortunately they said yes and using the 'Trade Manager' you can easily select the 'cards you get' and then 'cards they get' and then review the 'trade summary'.

In this instance I was after the 1968 set and the cards they were getting were mainly 2015 base set so I offered nearly 3 cards for my 1. Seemed a fair deal and always keen to set a sweetener on the first trade to encourage repeat trades.

Anyway the cards were posted in both directions, theirs arrived yesterday and mine arrived today.

So after all that build up here they are. 24 more cards for my 1968 collection and a 2015 insert I was missing too.

Nice cards in good condition and mostly nicely centred

 The other cards including the 2015 'Til It's Over

#1

12 months ago (late 2014) I got chatting to a parent at my daughter's football training and discovered he collected baseball cards. I'd not touched my cards since 2002/03 so had no idea about the current scene but we soon exchanged details and he invited me to join a Facebook group 'UK Cards'

My interest in collecting reignited and with some great collectors on the group 2015 has been a busy year.

I originally got in to collecting when a friend married a guy from New York and from 1999 to 2007 I used to visit regularly. In 2002 I began collecting the 2002 Upper Deck Series 1 set and this Christmas finally completed the base set after getting back into the hobby and getting the final card from COMC.

The reason for the blog was for 2 acts of kindness and the realisation that not everyone uses social media. I received two excellent parcels. The first from The Dutch Card Guy in Holland. This led to contact with The Italian Completist from unsurprisingly Italy. Both have huge collections and a sizeable tradelist so it's been great to strike up a relationship with these guys.

I'll post when I can or get anything of interest.