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Posted By: Morrie

Ray,

I just decided to get "serious" about collecting t206's, though I'm going the low-grade route (I'm an educator, too). My perspective on the answers to your questions may thus be different from others', but I don't think there are any definite rights and wrongs on this.

1. If all you care about is one card of each player/pose, then the backs are irrelevant. I view them as icing on the cake. A Cobb would fill the same hole in my set if it had an Uzit back as if it had a SC 350. If, on the other hand, you want to have at least one of each back represented in your set, that's cool. How important the backs are is up to you. There are hundreds of ways to collect the t206 set, and unless you're going for every possible combination of fronts/backs, I wouldn't worry too much about the ads.

2. eBay is a pretty good way to buy cards, although it's unpredictable. You hear horror stories about people buying trimmed cards off eBay, but I've bought 20+ t206's off eBay and never had one that looked trimmed, while the second one I ever bought at a card show was. My personal favorite is the old reliable - huge flea markets. Maybe I just got lucky, but I went to one this summer and met a dealer who was trying to unload a stack (50-60) of t205's in painful low-grade. I bought them all (no stars), and then when he decided to sell all his t206's, I was the first person he called. I bought over a hundred of them, skipping his Walter Johnson because of the erased pencil writing on the front and the 4 spots of paper loss on the back, where it had been removed from the album. He wanted more for that one card than I paid for the whole rest of the pile. I don't know how often that happens, but this once is enough for me to keep going back and looking at the flea markets.

3 & 4. I think Ty answered this one. There seem to be plenty, and the SCD catalog is comprehensive.

Good luck!

Morrie