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Brian McQueenBob - I'll go along with your comments about the Bates as you've certainly got more experience with this set than I. I did say that there a few cards that show up less often than others so I agree with your assessment. I was pointing out that there's not really a true set scarcity in the e94 set - something along the lines of a e90-3 Payne, e102 Wagner fielding or e103 Tenney. I've seen a couple Bates for sale in the past few months but not enough to make me think that they're commonly found at all.
Concerning the Grey Doolan, is this really a one-time slip up that only occurred on this very card? I was thinking that it fell into the same category as the orange backed e94s or the blue backed e90-3s. Where there was maybe an entire sheet that missed a color pass in the original print run. I figured there's more grey-backs out there that just haven't turned up yet. I've seen several e90-3 blues and I think we had found 12-15 e94 oranges but not enough to constitute entire sets of either. But it makes sense to hypothesize that they all came from the same sheet originally - even if they turned up in different collections later on. I figured the grey e94s sort of fell into that category as well. e94s were originally printed in sheets though and would have received their color passes through printing before being cut correct? So I figure that it's not probable that the grey variation could have existed originally on only one card. Would it not have been a part of a sheet at one time of cards that missed the same color layer?
But I did say that the grey color is an "anomaly" and does not count as one of the base colors in the set. Like I was saying, I feel the violets or perhaps the olives would count as the most difficult ACTUAL colors to try to find. Just my opinion though and others will certainly have different ideas/experiences.