Toughest T206's

[rfurnish]

I'm working on a PSA 4-5 set. I went through the population reports for every card in the set and ranked the cards in order of the overall # of cards graded for each subject. This turned out very close to Scot Reader's list, with the exception of my not accounting for valuation...in other words, expensive Hall of Famers ended up higher on Scot's list than on mine.

Then I took it one step further, ranking the cards by availability in the PSA 4-5 condition range, since this is where my personal focus is. This is when the names really started to move around on the list, creating some very noticable differences in my ranking vs. Scot's. (By the way, I believe that Scot's ranking is more useful than mine since he accounts for more variables than I do...also, his is based off of several sources, as well as auction activity, wheras mine is simply the PSA population report. His research is also more likely to account for crossovers, wheras mine doesn't).

I probably shouldn't write this since I still need one, but according to my list, the Ganley card ranks #28 overall in terms of difficulty in the 4-5 range. Looking at the recently completed auctions though, the card does appear pretty available in other grades or ungraded condition. It was really interesting to see how far some of the Southern Leaguers fell on the list, while some other cards moved up unexpectedly. I was surprised to see how far the Smith, Chicago & Boston card (I do have that one) as well as the Kid Elberfeld, Washington card fell down the list. Those two don't seem as difficult as I would've guessed. There were several cards which have more availability in sheer numbers as a whole, but moved up the list once only the availability of the 4-5 range was considered. The same can be said of several cards which seem to have limited overall availabilty but can be found in stronger numbers in the 4-5 range for some reason.

This information may be totally useless to someone not focusing on the 4-5 range, but it has definitely changed how I look at approaching some of these cards and what I'm willing to pay, especially for some (but NOT ALL) of the Southern Leaguers.