Tolstoi’s are only a small premium. Tolstoi is pretty tough and popular (by the relative standards of boxing
) in T218; but in T220 Tolstoi is not very difficult. There’s a lot less of them than Mecca and it will take awhile to build a 50 set if you don’t overpay, but there are readily available examples of pretty much every card and the price premium is generally small.
They were packed with T80’s in March of 1911 for one of the two halves of the T80 print run, which are pretty commonly found Tolstoi cards. Unlike many brands, like Piedmont (always common) or Red Cross (always brutal), Tolstoi seems to have had some unusual timing in releases that creates huge disparities in scarcity between its cards in different sets.
I paid about $400 to built a complete set card by card, if that helps. Not that much more expensive than Mecca, but much tougher than Mecca and very fun. Jack Dempsey took me a long time because I didn’t want to overpay, but I don’t believe either of the two probably sheets was printed in notably more or less quantity than the other. Getting to 40 was pretty easy, then some time to fill out the last ones.