Not a single person is disputing whatsoever that the find drastically increased the surviving number of cards. Pretty much every poster has said this, including me.
I don't know why we would expect a retailer, using the cards as a promotional tool in the middle of a fad for that exact tool (as the primary sources tell us), would order a quantity that would allow them to hand out 1 or 2 at most in a day. We can't know a hand out rate that business had, but the entire point of cards at this time was to use as a promotional tool. It would seem to be counterproductive to place orders of such a tool that would not allow much distribution to customers. A meat market in 1910 still needs customers to survive. It is possible the family guess is wrong and a relative acquired them years later from some other source for unknown reason, but I don't see how to arrive at that as the deductive probability. Perhaps I am missing an element.
We have actual production figures for other sets of this period that very strongly suggest a minuscule survival rate, not a large one.
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