TCdb vs. Beckett - First Impressions

 So I post a couple of weeks ago that I was starting to play around with TCdb.  I've been a loyal Beckett user for years now, and have become more down on it lately.  For collectors like me, it seems that TCdb has gathered a pretty decent sized following and positive reviews.  But how will it work for this collection?  Here's what I found.

TCdb Pros

Cost

You can't complain about the cost (free!).   Its like some of the other big services I use for my collecting, mainly wikipedia and [sport name]-reference.com in that they provide so much information but I just don't know how they do it well.  

The Checklists

The database is very comparable to Beckett.  Beckett does have some cards that TCdb doesn't have, and visa-versa.  Notable for this blog, Beckett does not list the 2017 Panini Iowa set, and TCdb doesn't have all the Iowa Hawkeye Football team sets from the late 80's, early 90's.  

Rankings!

After I enter in my card for a player, I can then see how I stack up against other collectors.  For instance, I'm done entering in my Sedrick Shaw cards and I can see that my 38 cards has me in second place behind herkyone (who often beats me in cards for Hawkeyes, no surprise there).  I'm am absolute demolished in pre-90's players usually, but am pretty decently ranked in 90's and 00's players.  I'm 1st on five players (David Johnson, Tim Costo, Nathan Panther, Matt Macri and Randall McDermott)

(Note: I cheated on the Randall McDermott, kind of.  He has one card, and I have it.)

TCdb Cons

I'm not ready!

So when I finish adding a player, I select an option to put all the other cards into my want list.  Which is great, but it does trigger matches which other collectors who do have the card.  Then they contact me wanting to trade (haven't added my trade bait), or they try to sell cards to me.  Which is fine, but I'm not ready for that until I'm done adding things.  So it gets a bit older to see new messages every day.

I'm going to have to organize better

Adding player collections is easy, but single cards seems difficult.  I search for the set, then the checklist for that set, then click on the card number, then click on Add for Trade.  In Beckett I can usually find the card with number year set quickly and add to my trade collection. I may have to sort all my cards by year/set in order to add them.

Pricing

Pricing is spotty, unreliable, and weird.  Beckett is at least consistent, stable, and gives everyone a baseline to work with.  (But is freaking expensive...)

TCdb Other Notes

Naming

Things are named differently than Beckett, for instance Aurora in Beckett and Pacific Aurora in TCdb.  And it can be inconsistent over years, starting as Finest and the next year being Topps Finest (that might not be the right example, but you get my drift).  Beckett feels more consistent.

Unintentional Parallels

Starting with Topps Gold back in the day, we started to get parallel versions of base cards, but TCdb has parallels on certain sets before that.  These include Donruss cards with "Inc" and "Inc." versions, Upper Deck hologram differences, Topps cards with "*C" or "*D" on the back, etc.  Beckett has some of these listed, but TCdb includes more.  I haven't decided if this is good or bad, as I have to find all these versions since I know they exist now.

My journey continues.