>>51233655Glad you came over to the winning side. For me, vintage is just WotC (so Base to Skyridge), but I realize this is pretty arbitrary. As for what to buy, do you have any nostalgia for any particular era? It's easiest to collect things you have a genuine interest in, and since I grew up with WotC, hunting down valuable cards, finding solid deals, knowing the "deep lore" about quirky cards in these sets, etc. comes easy to me. But if you grew up with the gen-3 e-readers or something, maybe that's a solid niche to pursue. There are valuable cards worth collecting across the history of the TCG.
>Should i only bother with holo cards or are the normals worth collecting too?Depends on why you're collecting. If you're interested in completing sets, then yeah, obviously you'll need non-holos. But if you're interested mainly in valuable cards, apart from base set 1st ed and some promos, yeah, you're going to stick mainly to holos.
I'd also say 1st eds are generally a solid thing to collect. They're better stores of value than unlimited cards, and from a qualitative point of view, it feels kind of nice knowing you have the "best" (or at least the most uncommon and valuable) version of a given card.
>Should i only gun for PSA graded cards?Depends on your tastes. I usually prefer raw cards, but the market is kind of fucked right now, and you can easily pick up PSA 8s (or even some PSA 9s) for the price of a raw """near mint""" cards, and those """near mint""" cards are almost guaranteed to be in worse shape than the PSA 8s. They're also less fungible if you're interested in reselling. So as much as I'd like to, I just can't recommend shopping for raw cards right now. Way too much of a hassle, and the value just isn't there at the moment.
