The Great Geek Yard Sale

There is a type of geek which exists called The Collector.  They find something, such as cards or action figures or old video game consoles, and they gather up as much of it as they can.  The justification for this is usually that there is an inherent value to said collectibles, and though they argue fiercely that said value is monetary, most of the world knows better.

I, however... I collect hobbies.  Board games, paintball, action figures, posters, magazines, all of the above.  When I find something new and shiny, I go after it with a vengeance and way too much of my disposable income.

It started when Decipher printed the Star Wars Collectible Card Game; I was still in middle school/junior high, and I loved Star Wars with a passion.  I bought cards whenever I had the extra money, all the way through my senior year of high school.  By that point I had picked up Magic, dabbled with some of Decipher's other games, bought a paintball gun to play with my brother, and had seriously begun looking at the emerging world of MMOs.  In college I started buying blister packs of Mechwarrior minis, then bought six of their Shadowrun action figure game cousins, convinced the local gaming group would start a league (they didn't).

Today, the paintball gear is being used for props in my wife's plays, the older action figures are gathering dust on an out-of-the-way shelf, and I have enough card games to wallpaper the house.  My wife was recently accepted to a PhD program another state away, and when we started going through stuff we'd rather get rid of instead of continuing to haul around, I reluctantly included the cards and action figures and paintball equipment on the list.  Not because I was forced to, but because I knew it was time to let go.

The only problem is... what the heck do I do with them?

LF Good Home for Childhood Memories, PST


I've seen people try to sell cards on the internet before, and especially with an older collection like mine it's a big undertaking.  Some of the singles could fetch around $60 at the most, but finding out which ones and handling the Ebay sales seems really daunting.  I hardly play the Auction House in World of Warcraft, so playing the internet auction games isn't quite my bag.  There are several local college students my wife knows that still play Magic and other geeky games, so I thought about trying to sell the collections to them.  But being college students they probably couldn't afford to buy the entire collection, even as a group.

So I turned to the tried-and-true method of getting rid of stuff you don't want and still making a buck off it:  the garage sale.

I'd put the action figures, the card games, all the stuff I didn't use anymore on a table and let them go wild.  For five dollars, they'd get a decently-sized card box and could fill it with whatever they wanted.  Larger boxes would go for a bit more, and I'd throw in some of the more obscure items as incentives to spend more money.  The focus would still be to get rid of the items, I just wouldn't be completely throwing them out on the street.

As I've been getting ready I've held some of the more rare cards back to take a stab at auctioning them on Ebay; who knows, maybe I'll turn out to be better at that than I have been at keeping my closet cleaned out.