Set Description:
This set is most definitely a work-in-progress and under out current policy of only making public completed sets, will remain obscured until we complete it, if ever. Our thinking here is that we don’t want to top the registry unless our set is complete, as we feel very strongly that completing a set with some uniformity of grades should be valued over having a few high registry point books. In our opinion, percentage of completion should go into a set’s scoring, not just a tabulation of points awarded to individual books, which may be fine for valuing an overall collection, but not individual sets. I was honestly always embarrassed when we were beating complete sets with incomplete ones just because we had a higher graded key and would feel justifiably short changed if we had a 250 book complete set in uniform high grades beaten by a single book, which is certainly possible under the current scoring system, as the Showcase #4 9.6 is worth more registry points than our entire complete Flash set with a minimum grade of 9.2 and dozens of single highest graded books.
Admittedly, in this case, our concern seems irrelevant in that nobody has completed this one, at least nobody who has registered their books. But I am aware of a better set out there, it is just not registered. It too is incomplete, but I think from where there are starting they could more easily complete this set than we can.
Moreover, I have not found that making public which issues we lack actually helps in finding such books, at least not at a reasonable price. Back when all our sets were public, I was often contracted by someone about a book we needed asking me two or three times what such book was worth thinking I would pay it because I needed it.
In this case, we may honestly never finish this set unless we lower our bar for acquisitions. Generally speaking, the books aren’t expensive, but they can be very difficult to find. We have just passed over the threshold of having more than 80% of the books with a minimum grade of 8.5, which sounds pretty good, but experience has shown us that the easy part is getting to 80% or so, that last 20% can be an absolute bear. I think this set is possibly doable in my lifetime, provided I don’t get hit by a bus LOL, but it is most definitely challenging. It would be interesting to have a history of each title and whether anyone has ever completed this set in the past. If they have, salute.
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