It was inevitable that I would start collecting again. While I knew I couldn’t live vicariously through Josh’s collection forever, the combination of building Zistle and finding my childhood collection intensified my hunger for starting up again. After some deliberation, I decided to begin by building a football collection. It is by far my favorite sport and since Josh collects baseball, our collections would complement each other.

So for Christmas, we adventured to our local hobby store and I decided on a box of 2007 Upper Deck Artifacts hoping that I might get lucky and score an Adrian Peterson rookie card. I wasn’t quite that lucky but I was extremely pleased with my pulls from my first box break. I scored four  relic cards including a Michael Vick, which supposedly Upper Deck removed from all of their 2007 releases. TO was another great one for me.

I pulled six rookies as well including a gold parallel of Trent Edwards numbered to 99. I also nabbed a red parallel of Philip Rivers numbered to 99.

I was a little disappointed that I didn’t get an autograph but the shop owner made it up to me by giving me a Jay Cutler rookie (since we share the same last name). A nice touch I wouldn’t get with an online retailer.

My first box break was awesome but using Zistle to add the cards to my collection and using the Box Breaks feature was by far more exciting. For the first time, I could enter my box breaks and build my collection using the site that we had been laboring over the last few months. Pretty cool.

Well, this is the first post for the Zistle Blog, the official blog of Zistle.com, which we hope will become the premiere online card collecting community and toolbox for card collectors everywhere. What in the heck does that mean? Well, imagine a world, where you could quickly build and update your collection online, where you can instantly find people with the cards you need to complete your set and you can browse an online card library with millions of cards. We want to be the most extensive resource of card information while providing collectors one of a kind tool to organize their sports card collection. And that is just the tip of the iceberg for what we have planned. Sound cool? We think so but we still have a lot of work to do to reach our dream.

How did we decide we wanted to build a card collecting site? Well, we recently rescued our childhood card collections from the obscurity of our parent’s basements. We immediately began sorting through our collections which not only made us reminisce about our youth and collecting cards but it also reignited our curiosity in the hobby. As we acquainted ourselves with the world of collecting, we realized we were having conversations like “wouldn’t it be cool if we could do this?” or “I wish I could find better information on this card”, etc. It didn’t take long before those conversations turned into an idea for a website and we knew we had to get to work right away.

So we have been working nights and weekends to get this site up and running. Our goal is to launch in beta on January 1, 2008. It will most likely be by invitation only so if you are interested, please let us know and we will be sure to invite you. We will be making frequent posts about our progress. Feel free to let us know if you have any ideas and keep collecting.