You know I’m big on curating a collection. It’s half the fun, in my opinion. For the most part, I do this on the front end, meaning that if I’m not very sure that I want to add a piece to my collection, I simply don’t buy that piece. This doesn’t mean that I never look at the existing collection through a critical lens though.
One time I do this is when a part of the collection ends. G4 slid slowly into G4.5 but Hasbro recently announced the start of G5, effectively ending the G4 toy line. It’s a perfect time to go over the G4 portion of my collection and see if there’s anything I’ve changed my mind about keeping. This includes the many (many) unopened packages I still haven’t gotten around to adding to the display yet.
I did the same thing at the end of G3, sitting down and going over the whole generation one pony at a time to see if there were any I no longer wanted. I try very much to focus on each individual pony when I do this. With G3 I looked at individual ponies, but I was also influenced by the number of figures I had and the space I had to display them. The display was crowded and I felt that I probably didn’t need as many ponies as I had. This resulted in my selling off quite a few ponies that I later added back into the collection when I found the pony second hand. It turned out that I actually quite strongly liked that individual pony, and, as collectors do, I found the room I needed to display everyone.
I’ve also done it after adding ponies unexpectedly to the collection. Sometimes when buying second hand you end up with something that wasn’t on your want list, but also isn’t already in your collection. The temptation can certainly be to keep the new piece because it’s new (to you), and better to do that than sell it on immediately and regret it later. However, I’ll go back and look at that pony again several months or a year later and think about whether or not I actually want her. More often than not, the answer is yes, but there have been times when I’ve felt instead that I’m keeping that particular figure only because it conveniently landed in my hands, not because I actually wanted it.
I find curating the vintage section of the collection easiest, possibly because I'm never in a situation where I'm standing in a store having to make a quick decision on whether or not I want a specific pony (thrifting is different than retail in this regard - thrifting requires you to know the market and make quick decisions based on perceived value while retail is just about whether you want it now). With the current line, there's always a chance that you'll never see that particular item on the shelves again, so you need to decide if you're buying it or not (a collector also often develops a 6th sense about whether or not a current item might be hard to find later). With the vintage ponies it can be a bit easier. Most figures are relatively easy to come by, so you've got a relatively good chance of finding another one later on. Collectors will learn which figures are hard to find or rare and be prepared to buy when they're ready to add that piece to the collection.
I've said before that I think curating is important in the life of a collector. This is part of how I curate but there's no right way of doing it. Every collector has to make their own choices about how to curate their collection. I just hope it's enjoyable.
Elf
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