Card Collecting Guides

There are 7 guides here. They divide into two kinds. Most are written pieces about the hobby — what to look for in a shop, how grading and selling work, how to start a collection — and are updated when the subject changes rather than on a schedule; each carries its own published and last-modified dates. One, the cities ranking, is computed from the directory at build time, so its tables move whenever the underlying data does.

What none of them do is rank or recommend individual shops. That lives in a different part of the site: best card shops by state orders independents on Google rating weighted by review volume, and the state and city indexes cover everything else. The guides are the background reading; the directory is the lookup.

Where a guide cites a count — shops in a state, cities with a given specialty — the figure is pulled live from the same dataset the directory pages use, not typed into the article. Each guide closes with a block saying how large that dataset currently is and when it was last refreshed, for the same reason: an article about a hobby ages slowly, and a number ages fast.