I hate to quote myself, but I priced up what I thought was a reasonably comprehensive "beginners" set, consisting of S, M & L sized stamps in each of:
> Bevellers:smooth & checkered.
> Backgrounder; thumbprint, lifters,
> Veiners: wiggler, smooth, mule feet
> Seeders: couple different patterns
> Camouflage: couple different patterns
> Borders: couple different patterns
And just that lot, without any fancy geometrics, came to almost AUD$2,000!
So i decided to spend some time buying up a bunch of vintage craftplus stamps on "that other place". Mainly focused on the very early ones where I could. I think I have about 250 stamps coming. Altho i tried to avoid it as much as possible, there are probably a couple of duplicates in the bunch, but hopefully not too many. I will keep these as spares or sell them off here in Australia. I managed to paid on average a little under USD$3 per tool.
I think that will be a good starting point, at least until i know what I'm doing. I also noticed that some sellers on there are selling Barry King stamps for significantly more than you pay buying them direct from the BK website!