Caramel Cards difficult ranking

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Posted By: david Poses

I remembered looking at caramel-cards.com a few years ago and went back yesterday- They list the scarcity in this order (from easy to hard):

E90.1 The most commonly found.
E95 Commonly found.
E92 Dockman Commonly found.
E91 Commonly found.
E96 Harder to find, not difficult.
E93 Harder to find, not difficult.
E101 A little harder to find, but not difficult.
E98 A little harder to find, borderline difficult.
E92 Croft's & Allen Difficult.
E106 Difficult.
The availability of the above sets as compared to the rest of the sets on this list is
rather pronounce. Even though E94 comes after E106 in this chart the
difference in availability between the 2 sets is quite dramatic.
E94 Very difficult.
E102 Very difficult.
E92 Croft's Cocoa Very difficult - almost as hard as Nadjas.
E92 Nadja Very difficult.
E103 Very difficult.
E97 Extremely difficult.
E90.2 Extremely difficult.
E90.3 Extremely difficult.
E99 & E100 Extremely difficult.
E105 Extremely difficult.
E104 Extremely difficult.
E107 Near Impossible - see one - BUY IT.
E97 Black & White Near Impossible - you don't buy it, I will.
E94 Overprints Near Impossible - you don't buy it, I will.

I assume that the site hasn't been updated in a while but I'm wondering if any of the experts here would rank them differently. I've noticed in my own research that some cards in any given set which exist in multiple sets are easier to find in the perceived more rare set than the vice versa - ie- the last time I looked, less E92 Chases are graded than E102, but E102 overall appears to be a harder set. I could have bought an E102 Chase at the same time as I bought the E92, and I settled on the E92 because of the lower cost. (Same condition).

Any anecdotal information is appreciated- examples of hard cards from easy sets, easy cards from hard sets, etc.

Here's one of my favorite E cards from my collection:

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Posted By: Todd Schultz

I have seen alot more E97 Camnitz cards than any other card from that set--noticeably so, at least to me.

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Posted By: Jon Canfield

I personally feel the E107s are not as scarce anymore as the listing indicates. There seems to have been a quite a few to come to the market.

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Posted By: Jeff Prizner

many hit the market when John Freund sold off his large collection of them last year. I don't agree with "Near Impossible - see one - BUY IT" but they are still pretty tough, especially if you're looking for a particular player and relative to the other 'e' sets.

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Posted By: Matt

Important to keep in mind when looking at lists is that there is a big difference between scarcity of finding ANY card from a particular issue vs. finding a particular instance of a card in a given issue. If issue A has 50 cards and issue B has 25, it might be twice as easy to find A card from issue A, but any given player found in both might be equal in terms of difficulty.

I did an analysis of the SGC+PSA pop reports about 6 months ago, that looked at per-player rarity (as you describe with your Hal Chase findings). Here were the results; the number in the parentheses is the average pop of each player's card, for the 10 or so players I looked at):

E95 (97)

E93 (60)
E90-1 (60)

E96 (43)
E98 (43)
E92 Dockman (43)
E102 (38)

E94 (32)

E103 (19)
E91C (18)
E101 (16)
E91B (16)
E91A (14)
E106 (12)

E92 Candy (8)
E105 (7)
E92 Cocoa (6)

E107 (4)
E104-III (3)
E92 Nadja (non St Louis) (3)

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Posted By: Marc S.

that E-104-IIIs have got to be one of the most difficult of E* series. There are still a number of uncatalogued players, and a number of cataloged/uncataloged for which less than three examples have been confirmed.

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Posted By: JimB

There is some general utility for pop reports and particularly in specific instances, but I know, for example, that A LOT of E93s have been cracked and resubmitted multiple times in the past year. So the pop #s are very distorted at this point, especially on the high end.
JimB

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Posted By: Matt

Jim - I don't doubt it. I wouldn't use the numbers I have in parenthesis for anything useful - the groupings that they broke up with are more important. Each E93 would have to have been cracked and resubmitted 15-20 times in order for them to jump into the E96/E98/E102 group.

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Posted By: JimB

Matt,
I hear what you are saying too, and as a general guideline, I imagine those numbers are useful indicators. The distortion with E93s has mostly been at the higher end, where for example, a recently discovered example gets a 7 on first submission. It then gets cracked and resubmitted four times (to both PSA and SGC) until it finally gets an 8. So pop reports list 4 or 5 sevens for a card when in fact there is one or two. The same is true with 8s that are crossed back and forth between PSA and SGC.
JimB