I collected back when we only had 152 pokemon, and I had seeeeveral staples I collected, but predominantly it was Ivysaur, Pikachu for teh lulz, Vulpix/Ninetales, Ponyta/Rapidash, Tangela, Gyarados, Chansey Electabuzz, Magmar, and the Eeveelutions. When I ran out of first editions, regulars, then shadowless to find, I had moved on to collecting different language ones... Like, I have an entire page of different languaged Ponytas (my fave weirdo cards being Norwegian and German)... then I stopped altogether because e-readers looked HORRIBLE with their design... Well, that, and high school/college kinda kept me distracted.
I got back into collecting and am trying to catch up again as of October, by finding baby evolutions and further evolutions, as well as collecting cards that just LOOK KOOL. I've been able to buy up a lot of the old collection boxes on Amazon to get neat promos as well as my hands on reasonably priced booster packs of old stuff inside them. My new loves are Milotic, Altaria, Serperior, Gothitelle chain, Malamar, Diancie and have re-fallen in love with Articuno. I'm 220 episodes in on the anime and am watching the movies when they fall in with the series, so I'm catching up on a lot of neat stuff!
Needless to say my collection is split between two binders, Pokemon #1-152 (including their baby and later numbered evolutions) in a 3" binder and my Pokemon #153-oblivion in a 4" binder to keep my organization straight and so my binders don't puke the card pages. I have a neat method of penny-sleeving my cards so they don't let your cards get scuffed and ruined on top if anyone is interested... although I've noticed from the thousands of trades I've probably done in my life, I'm the only one who takes care of their cards from the point of opening them from a pack. I had a dude tell me he wished my shadowless raichu (or something, I forget) were in better condition, when all of his holos and bulk were all in the same box getting knocked around. I reeeealllly wanted to tell him that the reason it wasn't good quality was because I had the bad fortune of finding only one trader way back in the day who did the same thing with their cards as he was doing to his. (The card he wanted had barely any scratches in that delicate foil and on the back it had a couple flecks of white on the edges, but otherwise it was in great condition{because I shove mine into sleeves immediately}, while I was trying to just ~have~ their secret holo Milotic that looked like it had been chewed AND pulled out of the teeth of a binder)...
Eerrrrunexpected rant overrr lol