"The Great Purge" Topic

2 weeks ago I attended MillenniumCon here in Texas. One of the guys there was selling off a huge collection of his fathers miniatures and vehicles. Amazing stuff from the late 80's and 90's.

I ended up finding some great figures for a great price. Looking through all the bins you could almost see his father's vision for the figures. There were a ton of conversions and things I have thought about doing and things I hadn't. He had boxes of cowboys next to boxes of GW Chaos and all the other GW line of figures. He had Mordheim, Bloodbowl and everything in between.

It was pretty amazing to dig through all those figures and just feel his passion or obsession depending on your world view.

That brings me my conundrum. Do I want to leave this world with a pile of lead that my wife has to then try to sell off or do I need to purge things to a manageable size.

I am in the process of packing up our apartment and moving to a slightly smaller space. In the process I am packing up all the miniatures I have ever collected minus the ones that I have traded or sold off.

I am thinking I need to downsize a bit and get more focused and make less clutter.

I usually would unload figures that I was a little bored with at convention flea markets. This year, at least at MillenniumCon, was really weak, so I didn't get rid of much.

My options are sell them on Ebay or Craigslist or Bartertown, keep them or give them away.

I have a friend who plays FOW, so I have already sent a bunch of stuff to him. He however just sent a bunch of stuff to me, so I got nowhere. :-)

What I really would like is another swap meet or something to really unload the figures. I will not make as much, but it is way easier than slowly Ebaying the figures.

Ive had good luck selling on TMP. You need to be a supporting member though.

Maybe we need an army trading board. Limit it to 100 or more figures.

BTW – stop buying huge collections.

We need to start using our local TMP barter town more. I'd rather my stuff ened up here among my fellow TMP brothers and sisters. Thoughts anyone? I personally detest Ebay, the gnashing of my teeth when I lose a bid, and its not good for my health :( and really the fair cost of trading the goods (we all know what a fair price for them is folks) so I'd be happy to do business mainly on our marketplace stops all that.
Cheers all

Zargon,

I will give you my tricks of the trade.

Use Auction Sniper and forget about getting in bidding wars. It bids in the last few seconds based on your maximum bid. I win about 90% of the things I really want.

Picclick.com – The best search engine for searching ebay.

I'm leaving that little problem to my son.

Assuming I live to a good age, I think what happens to my figs will depend on what my kids think of my gaming habit If it's something we both continue to enjoy into adulthood, I'd be much more likely to hold onto more of my miniatures.

If not, there will probably be a big selloff in about 20 years because I don't want to leave that kind of mess for them to sort through.

I seem to frequently acquire a batch of figs (usually second hand and in bulk) for a project and then lose interest before starting, so I use the TMP boards and my local game store's twice-annual auction to get rid of things periodically.

I dabble in ebay from time to time, but only when I have somethign that I know is worth quite a bit. Otherwise it's not worth my trouble. Bartertown is great for getting rid of GW stuff, but most of the stuff that I've collected is far enough out of the mainstream gaming that TMP is where it sells fastest and most reliably.

If you've got stuff you need to get rid of I know of a good home it could go to …

make a museum or donate to one, for historicals. You never know

My wife says she's throwing it on the curb. I'm thinking about selling a good part of it now because she meant it