[BobC]

I'm for the T205s myself. Besides the beautiful design, colors, and artwork, as others have already said, they include player bios and stats. You can love T206s all you want, but the T205 cards are truly the forerunner and very first appearance/example of what we think of as modern baseball cards today, in regards to including player information and statistics. In fact, it could be argued that T205s were also the model for all other modern cards for all other sports that now include player and statistical information as well.

T206 cards do not have any such similar historical significance in regards to card issues as they were preceded by the Old Judge cards from a few decades earlier, so they are certainly not the first major baseball set ever produced. Plus, the OJ cards used actual photos and not drawn images, making the OJs a forerunner of, and more akin to, what eventually became modern cards as well, and thus more historically significant than T206 cards ever were also.

I've wondered what it is that actually seems to have made the T206s so popular as a vintage card set though, and have theorized that it is mostly due to the sheer number of T206 cards produced that survived and are still in circulation today. More people were aware of T206 cards over the years because there are more of them out there than anything else, and pretty much anyone wanting one could find one. So my thinking is it would be familiarity that helped to make T206s so popular as opposed to anything special or groundbreaking about the cards themselves.

It has been discussed on the forum before how some cards/card sets can be too rare for their own good. Since no one can really ever find them, fewer people care or are ever attracted to collecting them, and thus demand (and value) can be extremely low. When discussing real vintage cards though, virtually anyone could come across T206s, and because they were known by most vintage collectors and somewhat more easily obtainable, new vintage collectors would most likely start with T206 cards as well due to their overall familiarity and availability. Familiarity and availability breeding more demand in an expanding marketplace. Of course, once computers and markets like Ebay arrived, the T206 familiarity and volume factors driving the set's appeal and demand among collectors was mitigated, but the set's popularity and appeal had already become firmly ingrained in vintage collector's minds and was here to stay. Along with the fact there are still so many T206s out there that anyone looking can pretty easily find them, and thus further fueled collector desire and satisfaction.

And that is a huge reason I'm not really interested in T206s, because they are so common and chased by everyone else. I find more satisfaction in other and more obscure and maybe not so popular issues as a collector. Why collect something everyone else collects when there are so many other more obscure, interesting, and significant sets and cards out there.