It depends on whether condition matters to you and/or whether you are buying as an "investment." Most smart collectors will tell you that cards aren't investments, unless you buy near-one-of-a-kind cards or are a very serious dealer, where you buy for much less than retail, and hence have the mechanism for mark-up. Obviously to get to that level of "investment," you have to put up considerable capital.
If you just like the series and want to collect to get familiar with the deadball era or you like tobacco cards and old printing and advertising, or any other reason why you are attracted, then maybe you think about ways to just get your feet wet, and not worry about grading.
I bought my first T206 at a card show in Valley Forge, PA in 1985. My dad gave me and my brother $20 to go buy cards. My brother bought two boxes of the latest Topps baseball/football sets, and me, I went and bought six or seven pre-1920 beaters. There was no grading then, and though my T213 Knabe and T206 Collins were creased up and had back damage, I was hooked on those particular cards, not even knowing what I had. As time goes on, you learn more. I continued buying beaters all through my teen years. As I said in another post, I also bought a full Galasso 1983 reprint set of the T206 series while on my first visit to Cooperstown. It's not the way most collectors would go, but as a kid, that helped me become familiar with every image and player in the set, and I went about finding an original to replace the reprints with. That's just how I chose to do it and have never regretted it.
More recently, I've had some of the most fun these past few years reading Ted Z.'s post about the ins and outs of the set. It never ceases to make me want to run to my collection and see if I have anything that he wrote about.
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