The road in colleting My Little Ponies can seem very overwhelming and complicated at first. Mostly what you need is just to take the time and patience to get in the game and start learning things from personal experience. First start off by identifying your ponies. Getting the ID of your ponies would be complicated and difficult it if wasn't for Dream Valley. Kimberly has a step by step process that lets you very easily identify almost every My Little Pony ever made. It's vital in starting off with My Little Pony collecting. But here are some pointers that you get from the mistakes that I've made:

• First, take some time and get to know the my little pony line. When you tackle reading Dream Valley the Collectors Guide to My Little Pony or The My Little Pony Collector website for the first time, the sheer volume of ponys and pony related merhandise will astound you! Just take the time to learn a little about which type of pony you prefer and which sets you would like to start your collection. This will be a huge leap forward. Beyond Dream Valley, you can view hundreds of different ponies each day on auction sites such as ebay and yahoo, as well as personal web sites devoted to collector's collections. Just as if you were buying a car or a house (and believe me, if you get hooked, you will understand that investment analogy) the more you know before even starting to collect the more enjoyable the collecting will be.



• The real key to collecting my little pony, or anything else, is patience. patience, patience, patience. There are some of us who have been collecting my little pony for years and years and years and have yet to complete the collection. There is no shortage of ponies available, (despite any rumours you may read to the contrary) so take your time, learn the ropes, talk to experienced collectors, ask questions, and have fun!
  
  
• If you're really concerned about the condition of ponies, make sure you ask the seller any questions that aren't in the description. Hair frizz, minor marks, symbols rubs, anything that concerns you. This will be different for every person. Some people can't stand minor symbol smudges while other people (me :)) need the hair of a pony to absolutely perfect. It depends on what you're looking for.



• A good place to start looking for sites that sell my little ponies are through webrings. Just do a quick search for my little pony at yahoo webrings and you'll come up with about 30 rings full of sites dedicated to buying/selling/trading my little ponies. The most popular place to buy ponies is definitely eBay with listings of 1-2 thousand pony lots, you can usually find what you're looking for here.



• If you're new to this, I suggest not doing trades when you start off. Most people find that they were taken advantage of when the first started out or accidentally traded off some really hard to find ponies without knowing it. Or people have decided to sell ponies and didn't get nearly enough for them. Bookmark a few ongoing eBay auctions that have similar ponies in them, and see what the ending bid is around. Take the average of a few different auctions as eBay tends to fluxuate.



• Sellers put RARE!!! Or VHTF (very hard to find) in every auction they ever put out. Just because you see that a seller thinks what they have is rare or hard to find, doesn't mean that it is. McDonalds ponies are not rare in the this lifetime or probably the next. And the longer you collect, the more you will hate the buggers. Next point



• Keep a list of referances! If you successfully complete a sale, start a list of and keep track of all the people you've done business with so that when you're working on other trades/sales/etc you have a group of people your business partner can check with to make sure you're a valid trader.