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E, DanielAl, you beat me to the punch. Of course I had to kick start my brain cells to work fast enough to understand what Scott has so generously tried to explain to the simpletons like myself on this board.....
How's this for a slight embelishment:
Firstly, if Piedmont were the first back printed, a couple of sheets were mocked up and shown to prospective players to get their approval. Most say yes, Wagner says no. So the sheets were saved by the then Gen. Manager of ATC (or whoever was commissioning the printing) as a keepsake. Thus, no more Wagners printed.
Unfortunately, when the Sweet Caporals were created from the existing artwork/plates the Wagner plate had not been changed out and was thus run alongside the rest of the player issue. Cards go out in packaging and the Wagner is quickly 'discovered' by the public who were only too aware of his non-appearance in the Piedmont packets - on the first day of sale I would imagine. Wagner hears about it and calls the Gen. Manager and threatens legal action if all existing copies aren't pulled from the factories and points of sale.
Thus, a smattering of SC Wagners survive to be the curious scarcity we know them as, and some time in the middle late 1980's the Piedmont sheets find their way into the hands of someone who wants to profit from them.
The rest is the rest.
How's that Scott?
Oh, and the difference between some printer buddies working at the same establishment as was responsible for an earlier set - having access perhaps to original plates and or artwork and thus mocking up 'fill in' cards, and generating ENTIRELY NEW artwork and plates for T206 Wagner, Plank, and unknown from...I don't know where, is a HUGE leap in rationale. If one of those workers actually owned a wagner, how big an incentive does he have to make the card less valuable? How long did it take him to attain it, and knowing its scarcity and history - why screw that up? How likely is it that all his mates were t206 collectors? And if they went to all this trouble to create them (and they would have lost their jobs if they had been found out) and run the risk of legal action over copyright of the original product, would they only run a sheet or two of the product? Why haven't more of the dupes survived if they were produced in ostensibly larger numbers than the original Wagner.
For me, you've just gotten caught up in your own sense of cloak and dagger intrigue without a whole lot bones to back it up. To then go on and scoff at anyone who doesn't believe your hypothesis is childish.
Daniel