Price Check Aisle 9...

[trdcrdkid]

Originally Posted by Pilot172000

Please allow me to restate my intentions of this post. I for the most part know the general progression of common to rare backs. This board does an amazing job of illustrating that. I also know that through a tremendous amount of digging that most sites especially ebay are inflated in price mostly because of cost of doing business. While I would certainly love to have all the backs I asked about in the first post, my intent is to get a solid guide post as to which direction to start. Do I try to pick up most of the uncommon backs? Do, I set my sites on a singular back like the American Beauties and branch out slowly? I completely understand that many on here painstakingly spend and enormous amount of time researching and collecting early tobacco cards are are not too keen on giving advice to neophytes. For that I apologize.

On the contrary, most of the experts here are happy to give advice to neophytes, as long as they're genuinely interested. I didn't see your original post before you deleted it, but I gather you were asking about how best to collect the tougher T206 backs. My advice echoes what others have said: keep your eyes open, be patient, and collect what interests you. I became interested in T206 backs more than 20 years ago in the early 90s, when the tougher backs were much more affordable in relative terms, but it wasn't as easy to find cards as it is today. Back then I would scour the ads in Sports Collector's Digest each week looking for things I was interested in, primarily T and E cards (including tough T206 backs), and sometimes bid in auctions in SCD like the long-gone David Festberg's (from whom I got a lot of tough T206 backs and type cards).

Nowadays, it depends on what your collecting budget is and what you're looking for, but I would definitely keep an eye on the T206 B/S/T forum here on Net54, and set up eBay searches for T206 + the names of the tougher backs (Cycle, American Beauty, Tolstoi, etc.). I have several such searches saved, and you can set them to send you e-mail alerts when new things matching the search are listed. Also watch the auctions by the many auction houses that handle vintage cards, nearly all of whom have T206s, often with tougher backs. Those cards will all be graded, and many are high-grade cards that go for a pretty penny, but it's sometimes possible to find pretty decent deals on T206s in some of the auctions.

If you're not sure what you want to collect, get examples of a bunch of different T206 backs, raw and graded, and see what tickles your fancy. There are as many ways to collect that set as there are collectors.