What sparked your desire to collect MLP?

[Sunset]

I was a child in the 80's and ponies were some of my favorite toys.  Between my sister and myself, we had about 30-40 ponies.  I packed them away in my closet during my pre-teens and early teens.  Then about 96 or 97 (I was about 16-17) my mom started letting me come to her work during off hours to play on the Internet.  It was still such a new thing back then.  I discovered that there were people out there actively collecting mlp.  It re-sparked my interest and appealed to the treasure hunter in me.  I pulled out my old toys and started going to garage sales looking for ponies.  I've been collecting on and off ever since.

[egyptiondragon]

I only had 1 pony as a kid G2 berry bright and a bunch of fakies I didnt see berry very much cuz she was at my dads and I lived with my grandmother.  but I did collect unicorn figurines I had a ton (all gone now lost to my many moves) I didn't get interested in mlp till I saw a bunch of people on my WoW forum with Pony avis and sigs. curious I checked out FIM and loved it. Didn't buy any toys for a long time till my boyfriend at the time whom I was living with encouraged me to collect something as he collected action figures. I went and bought the first toys R us blind bag set as I didn't really want bush-able hair figures. That changed as soon as a I saw a rainbow dash I picked her up and fell I love soon I had to have all the characters that appeared on the show (I wish I had gotten everything cuz all the rare bushies were everywhere  ) Thats about when I joined the arena and even then I resisted other gens took me a while to come around but now I collect all gens! I love the arena for showing me all the pretty ponies

[DorkyDuck]

Honestly when i was a kid, my little pony used to scare me!  I never owned any ponies when i was younger and I would avoid them in toy stores..  For some reason i just couldn't deal with them haha.  Now they are just so pleasing to me and such fun colors and sweet faces.  I started collecting g4 funko mystery minis and blind bag figures last december because I loved the FIM show.  Then i started looking around the internet, saw the older gen ponies again and decided to take a look on ebay and see what i could find to see if i liked any of them.. and started collecting them over the past few months!  Idk why i was scared of them when i was younger because i think they are beautiful now and i'm so happy watching my collection grow!

[ponycentric]

Like many others have said, I grew up with ponies.  I always had them as a child, and they were my favorite.

When I was 12 and away for the summer my Mom threw them out!  I was devastated and didn't have another pony till G3 came out.  I started by those when I was 18 or 19.  Has up to 50 at one point (which was wrote a lot for me).  Then, due to some relationship upheaval, I ended up losing my entire collection. 

Didn't start collecting again till G4, which took my awhile to even get into.  Love them now and have a decent collection of vinyls with a handful of brushable. 

Anyhow, I love G4, but what I really always wanted was to have G1s again.  But I am like an archaic old woman when it comes to using the internet for buying things, and I really didn't get the concept of using eBay and such. 

I ended up at my boyfriend's no longer lived in childhood home, looking through things left there, when we unearthed three flutters.  They were rather grungy and in need of help.  I managed to brave the webs and found some restore info, which ended up leading me here!

Now I'm 10 days in with 12 ponies on the way, and I'm completely hooked.

I wished to replace the ones I lost as a child, and I'm nearly there!  Now the list just keeps growing, so many beautiful ponies to acquire.

[zombienixon]

Friendship is Magic is what got me into ponies. About nine months or so after I first saw the show and about a month or two after watching Season two (at first, I thought it only had one season, so I watched it all and kind of forgot for a few months to focus on school).  I think I found out about the blind bag ponies either from Equestria Daily or an MLP Livejournal group that I was a part of a few years ago. 

I was kind of reluctant to buy them at first, but I eventually caved because I have a real soft spot for cutesy girly things like this. It kind of doesn't make sense in retrospect considering at that point I had a small collection of Disney Princess storybooks and some little figures. But it was July 2012 or so that I got my first pony- a blind bag Twilight.

It kind of just went on from there.  At first I was restricting myself to only blind bags, but I gradually started buying more and more kinds of merchandise.  First I included brushables, then plushes, and then EqG and G3s. Every time I went through the same process (well, mostly with the brushables and EqGs).

1. Has no interest in toy
2. Sees a toy that I find cute
3. Reluctant/embarrassed to want the toy
4. Finally gives in and buys the toy
5. Embarrassed to have bought the toy
6. Gets over embarrassment, buys several more of the same kind of toy

It's ironic, I remember that when I started watching FiM, I told myself I wouldn't get any of the toys. Now I have to restrain myself from buying too many.

[Rhubarbpie]

I am fairly new on the collecting circuit. I never really had ponies when I was little. My toy life pretty much revolved around my baby dollies and my Sindy collection - nothing much spectacular there guys, mostly 2nd hand and hand made clothes. I do still have my child hood Keyper, Diamond though... I do remember playing with my friends ponies and Lullabye Nursery which she gave me a year or 2 ago when she heard I was collecting ponies and her parents were clearing the house before they emigrated 

One day about 4-5 years ago, I was mooching through Youtube and found a clip of MLP FiM Winter Wrap up episode.  I watched it out of curiosity and loved it and had to watch more and more and gradually got more into them. Then I was out shopping one day and saw a Twilight Sparkle and a Rainbow Dash toy and bought them thinking they were cute! Then I had to complete the 6, but couldn't find Pinkie, so I ended up getting the playset with Pinkie and Sweetiebelle.  I couldn't leave Sweetiebelle on her own, she HAD to have her 2 friends, so I got those too, along with Cheerilee. So I thought, well she's in the show so why not? Then I got other show characters.  Then I needed a princess of some kind to keep these ponies in order. About this time I joined the Arena and realised there were far more other G4 ponies who were not really in the show, so I started buying those.

Eventually my attention turned to G1 and G3 ponies.  My fella brought home a box full he found at a car boot sale saying that he knew I was collecting now, but these aren't the ones I collected but maybe some one on the Arena might want to buy them........these ponies are STILL in my collection    I never sold them and now I have a collection of 850 ponies!!!

[Honeycomb]

Ponies were my favourite toys as a child. I never got rid of my childhood herd (about 30), and in the early ebay days I started to have recurring dreams of them, so I looked them up on ebay and started to buy all those that my best friend used to have, and I had always wanted.

[Ponykit]

Back in 2007, I got a Minty from the McDonald's promotion, which led to me wanting to get all the ponies from that set. I started collecting Ponyville ponies soon after it ended. It took me longer to start collecting the full-sized ponies.

[Kiwi]

I came across my childhood ponies, went online to ID them...and discovered G3s were about to be released. The rest is history.

[Katika]

I got my first pony, SS Wind Whistler, for Easter the year I turned 2.  From then on, almost every picture of gift-giving times has me with a pony in hand (or packaged nearby).  In a sense, I collected since then.  Around hmmm... 4th grade? I packed most of my MLP away (and my mom got me to get rid of most of them... only kept about a dozen) in exchange for the more realistic horses like Grand Champions.  They followed me until about junior high, and then I got too involved in school to really play with anything at all.

Fast forward to college.  One of my friends and I were at Walmart and for some reason, she *really* wanted a Barbie doll, so we went to the toy aisles to look at them.  While we were discussing how silly it was that there were no cheap Barbies anymore, I happened to see five or six G3s sitting on the shelf.  I laughed and mentioned how much I used to love MLP and, feeling nostalgic (and a little justified, since she was after a Barbie to begin with), I carefully selected Sparkleworks II, since she looked like she was having fun.  We finished our shopping and went back to our dorm rooms.

My dorm was pretty old and hadn't had any renovations since the 70s, and our closet doors were these terrible metal, rusty orange things.  Long story short, the closet doors helped me discover that Sparkleworks II had a magnet in her foot.  Considering I used those doors as a bulletin board of sorts, I got a good chuckle out of how I could just use her as a magnet.  Next Walmart trip, I picked up Daisy Jo, Rainbow Dash and Pinkie Pie so that they could be magnets, too.  And then the next trip, I picked up a few more.  And then Thanksgiving break came and I dug my remaining G1s out of storage.  From there, I sort of lost all control and the entire pony thing just sort of rained down on me, lol. 

[Bibinettepony]

I got my first and only MLP  , ( but I also got 2 remcos  ) for Xmas (my parents  ) when I should be 7. It was Tickle, OMG!! the best pony ever!! Violet and Pegasus with rainbow hair WHAT A LOVELY COMBO!! My mother told me that they chose it because of all this 
I really played a lot with her, and brought her everywhere (except school, too afraid to lose her  ) When I grew up and my parents get divorced, we moved and moved. Till we lived with the family of my father in law. As the house was a bit little, a part of our stuff was stored in the garage. I was a teenager at this moment. Few years later, my mom saw was the garage was cleaned!! no more stuff!! she asked where was the stuff and my father in law answered he throught to garbage all stuff 
really several years after, in 2011 I am married, with a child and one day the idea came to me I wanted Tickle back  so thanks the internet , I begun research and i discovered:

THE MY LITTLE PONY WORLD!!! OMG all these lovely ponies in front of my eyes!! and of course I found a new Tickle 

when I saw more ponies and felt in love specially with the French ones  and the Greeks 

this is how all begun...

PS: I assume that : as I do not remember seeing them in the shops and just remember the package of Tickle at XMAS that's why I really really fell in love with pony in MOC or MIB condition 

PS2: I also do assume that I really think My little pony is the real best toy which was created FOREVER!!!!