[Peter_Spaeth]

Originally Posted by packs

I still have a hard time with the hardline manufactured rarity heat people bring up. This board is full of people who are completionists and have to have every card of any given set with all possible combinations. Cards like this are made for people like that. You have to have this card because it completes a master set. But you don't like this card because it has a number printed on it. If you collect rare backs or type cards, I don't understand why you would have a problem with manufactured rarity. Bowman didn't put a price tag on this card. Only a number. It's up to collectors to assign the value. So why get mad at the manufacturer when you're just as hungry for certain cards without numbers on them? You can have your every day Cobb with a Sweet Cap back or you can go crazy over a Brown Lenox. What's the difference? It seems obvious that Lenox, Uzit, Drum etc were all printed in lower numbers than the other backs. You have 52 Hi's and 52 lows both purposely printed in different quantities. But they aren't seen as manufactured rarity because they weren't meant to be valuable. I think thats just semantics.

I personally don't buy rare backs or rare anything, but I can appreciate the difference between a card that is rare for what I would call natural reasons and a card that is rare only because a modern day manufacturer contrived to create a collectible by creating some meaningless variation like a numbered refractor.