From Hostel Common Room to Personal Vault: A Collector’s Story
jayesh
·
·
3 min read
The first card Aditya Menon ever bought was a 2003 Topps Chrome Dhoni in a battered penny sleeve, picked up at a Bandra flea market for ₹500 in his second year of engineering at VIT. Today the same card, since graded PSA 9, is worth roughly 60× what he paid. He has 240 more like it.
This is what six years of patient, thesis-driven collecting looks like — assembled almost entirely from his hostel common room, a phone, and the discipline most of us pretend to have.
The Original Thesis
“I was reading about asset classes during the 2020 lockdown and stumbled on the PWCC indices. Cards of Indian sports heroes were genuinely undervalued compared to American athletes, and I figured if I could buy them while no one else in India was looking, the worst case was I owned cool stuff.”
The thesis was simple and held up: collect graded cards of athletes who had legitimate global fanbases but were primarily traded by Indian collectors. Dhoni. Tendulkar. Eventually, Bumrah and Kohli rookies as they appeared in Topps Cricket sets.
The First ₹50,000
“My monthly card budget was ₹2,000. That sounds small but compounded over a year, plus the occasional birthday cash from family, I had ₹40,000 a year going into the collection. I made every rupee work — only buying cards that were either undervalued at retail or being sold by people who didn’t know what they had.”
The breakthrough came in 2022 when he picked up a raw Sachin Tendulkar 1996 ICC World Cup card from a dusty Crawford Market shop for ₹1,800. After grading at PSA, it returned a 9, and he sold it 14 months later for ₹47,000.
The Mistakes
“I bought into hype twice and regretted it both times. Once on Pokemon during the 2021 mania, once on a Manchester United Cristiano Ronaldo rookie at the peak of the comeback hype. Both lost about 35% in 18 months. Lesson: if your thesis can’t survive someone screaming about the card on YouTube, it’s not your thesis, it’s theirs.”
The Vault Today
Aditya’s collection now sits in a Eureka Forbes electronic dry cabinet in his Pune apartment, broken into three buckets: Indian cricket (60%), global vintage cricket (25%), and 1-of-1 / autographs (15%). He sells about ₹1.5 lakh worth annually and reinvests proceeds into pieces he believes will hold for the next decade.
His advice for someone starting today: “Pick a niche so narrow it sounds boring. Mine was Indian cricket. Yours could be NBA centres of the 1990s, or Yu-Gi-Oh promos from 2001–2005. Niches let you become an expert faster than the market, and that’s where the edge is.”
Why We Tell These Stories
Every collector who walks into the shop has a version of this story — most just earlier in the timeline. We feature one in the Vault Journal each month because the most useful thing the hobby teaches isn’t about cards, it’s about discipline. If you’re building your own vault and want it featured here, the contact form on the homepage is the place to start.