To a certain degree Burdwick's decision to consider it as one set accords with that of the issuer, ATC. After all, when they added new cards (fronts), they changed the backs to indicate that the set as a whole had grown. In fact, there are nowhere near 460 subjects in the "460 series", but that is close to the number of total subjects in the T206 set including those issued in the 150 and 350 series (I realize none of those numbers were perfectly accurate). So, perhaps Burdwick's intuition was correct in designating all cards with similar looking fronts issued between 1909-11 by the ATC via its tobacco brands to be "T206s". That seems to have been the thinking of the ATC, that it was one massive set of baseball subjects used to advertise the whole host of their tobacco brands of the period.
JimB
P.S. Similar questions could be asked about N172. In that case, one could make more compelling arguments for multiple different sets on a number of grounds.
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