Posted By:
Frank WakefieldThis set is not as simple as 4 different 30 card sheets.
For starters, the cards don't bunch up into 4 groups of cards sorted by difficulty to obtain, ie there aren't 29 cards that are as difficult to locate as Mitchell.
I have seen one complete set of these cards. I'm not saying that complete sets are rare... what I'm getting at is that I've seen 120 different, in my hand (raw, no slabs or sheets) once. What I've not seen is a box of 300 of 'em. With T206s sometimes someone (Ted, ahem) has more than 500 at a time. Once I had about 550 T206s, only 513 different. What would be really helpful is to spread out a dozen or so of each player, to look for ever so slight printing differences and consistencies in a particular card. What we might see is that there were 7 printings of 30 cards at a time, as Ed H mentions above. That maybe they only changed a few of the cards, instead of all of them, once or twice. Each of the 7 printings need not have the same size press run. Maybe they were going to lay out 30 new cards but thought hey, why not leave Ty Cobb on there and let's print only 29 different. Maybe at the end someone had Mitchell on a new plate when an art guy came in with a new Wagner throwing design, and thought 'let's pull that moonhead image of Mitchell and put a real ballplayer, Honus, on there.'
With T206s we're more likely to have duplicate fronts because of the back differences. We as collectors are less likely to do that with E90-1s. And maybe we're missing some front detail or plate wear because of that.