I believe Plank, Wagner, or any other card, for that matter, could have easily been pulled from production without having any effect to the other subjects who were also printed from that same sheet.
We know from the commonly seen miscut T206s that have part of a name at the top of the card that the overwhelmingly common sheet configuration was to have the same subject running repeatedly in a vertical column. So, as a simple example, a typical sheet may have looked something like this:
It’s kind of a Printing 101 question, but how did a sheet come to have, in this example, eight perfect copies of the same subject in a column? They certainly were not hand-drawn on the printing plate eight times. If that were the case, we’d see minute differences in the appearance of clouds and trees and facial features between examples of the same subject. The answer is that the image must have been drawn once on a separate small plate and then transferred to the printing plate multiple times. This was in fact very commonly done in commercial lithography 100 years ago. If anyone’s interested, I’ll try to dig out my litho books tonight and give a deeper description of the process.
If this was indeed the process used for producing T206 sheets, then plates could be reconfigured with ease. If Wagner (call him example B in the image above) complained about his likeness being used, American Litho could have simply scrapped the printing plate and made a new one with players A, C, D, E, F, and a replacement for Hans. Since the original artwork was on a separate smaller plate, any card could be added to a new production plate at any time. The process would be very quick and flexible, as it absolutely had to be if you’re printing millions of T206 cards.
Jamie