Published October 04, 2025 | By Michael M, Collectors MD Community Member

Sometimes, addiction comes in a form we don’t expect or recognize.

I thought I was one of the smart ones. I thought I was doing it the right way. I didn’t rip packs and pray for hits. I didn’t go into Whatnot streams and spin the wheel, gambling away my money for nothing.

“Buy singles!” the Reddit community screams at everyone who asks for purchase recommendations. And I would sagely nod along.

I had been addicted to ripping Hearthstone packs before. I learned from that. I cut myself off, locked myself out of my account, deleted all my socials, and stayed away. It worked! I was cured. And now I could safely enjoy basketball cards—because I wasn’t ripping packs, I was buying singles.

What I hadn’t realized was that buying singles could be an addiction too.

Stacks of mailers and scattered singles—what first feels like harmless enjoyment can, almost imperceptibly, give way to compulsion that settles in beneath our awareness.

My own self-deception should have been the first warning sign.

“Oh, yeah, these are all low value”, I’d convince myself. “I only spend like one dollar on each card.”

Why wouldn’t I tell my wife, whom I love, that I was spending more than that? What about the buzzing anticipation, checking the mailbox days before anything could possibly arrive? The rush of tearing open packages? The way I always bought late at night, or after bad news, just to cheer myself up?

I thought it was just the hobby being fun. But it was something else.

There was shame in admitting it—that I was using singles as retail therapy. I thought, That’s for women, men don’t do that. But no. Men can fall into retail therapy too. And reading an article on Collectors MD was the moment the penny dropped: I was feeding my addictive behavior again.

The hard part is that I did genuinely like the cards I bought. I displayed them, showed them to my kids, talked about them with relatives. There was joy. But hundreds of dollars worth of joy?

I started asking myself different questions: not just, “Do I like this?” but, “Do I like this more than a new board game, a better car, a vacation? Will this card bring me more joy in six months than what I already own?”

When is enough truly enough? What is the purpose of the purchase?

I don’t have all the answers yet. But I do know this: recognizing that addiction was in play was the first, crucial step in my recovery.

#CollectorsMD
Addiction hides in plain sight—and sometimes even in the places we think are safe.

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