I'm going to suggest that the ones that were found never left England and never circulated. The condition throughout is so uniformly sharp that it is virtually impossible they were ever distributed. Probably all the ones that were sent to the soldiers are lost, and only those that never went much farther than the factory could survive in that condition. Like Wonka suggested, soldiers fighting in WW1 weren't keeping their prized baseball cards in card savers. And since all the surviving examples are in the category of one or two known, the ones that are left are an anomaly. Some miracle saved them from destruction.
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