Quote:
Originally Posted by Leon
The US mint has circulation numbers of each coin, or better said, how many of each was made. It is usually a specific number...even if many have been lost or destroyed there is a number to start with. That is not a luxury that pre-war card collecting can have except in very rare (no pun intended) cases.
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Right - but what we can determine with a fair amount of precision is relative rarity. I don't need to know exactly how many E101 Cobbs exist vs E102 Cobbs to make a determination that the E101 is rarer then the E102. We have enough information to accurately assign a 1-10 number to each card in terms of rarity, since that scale is relative to other cards.
You start with the rarest card at one extreme and the most common at the other and work out the math in between. I wrote
a post about 2 years ago regarding E-card rarity that did just this; they naturally broke into about 6 or 7 groups of rarity.