T207

[Luke]

Yeah only 49 of the "Recruit Class" players have been found with Anon Fact 3 back. I expect there was a 50th printed, and hopefully we find out who it is someday. Based on artwork, and which players have been found with blank backs, the possibilities for that 50th player can be narrowed down to just a handful.

[ValKehl]

Is WaJo 1 of the 49 "Recruit Class" players who has been found with the Anon. Fact. 3 back?

[brianp-beme]

Originally Posted by Luke

Yeah only 49 of the "Recruit Class" players have been found with Anon Fact 3 back. I expect there was a 50th printed, and hopefully we find out who it is someday. Based on artwork, and which players have been found with blank backs, the possibilities for that 50th player can be narrowed down to just a handful.

Is there a list available of the 49 known "Recruit Class" Anon Factory 3 subjects? Perhaps someone on here has the elusive 50th without knowing it.

Brian

[Luke]

Val, no Wajo is not in that group.

Brian, here is the site I use for my t207 questions. It's Mike's image event site.

https://imageevent.com/gspinf/t207br...2ghxuok2.goose

[Luke]

If you look at all 49 of those poses, you'll see that they bear a striking resemblance to the Broadleaf class poses. In other words, the artwork for this group of 49 (probably 50) was of very high quality, just as the Broadleaf class poses are.

The first 100 players (I realize the checklist has more than 100 poses) in the Recruit Class contain some pretty clunky artwork (Johnson, Konetchy, Reulbach, etc).

So, whoever the 50th member of the Recruit Class that was printed with Anon Fact 3 backs is, it will be a pose that has high quality artwork. It won't be WaJo or Konetchy, etc.

Also, there have been a decent amount of Recruit Class players found with blank backs, but none of them have been in that group of 49. So, I l believe we can exclude any Recruit Class player who has been found with a blank back from being the possible 50th member of the Anon Fact 3 group. The reasoning there is the blank backs that are out in the hobby probably came from a handful of sheets, and as of now at least, all the known BBs feature poses from the first 100 Recruit Class poses.

[brianp-beme]

Originally Posted by Luke

Val, no Wajo is not in that group.

Brian, here is the site I use for my t207 questions. It's Mike's image event site.

https://imageevent.com/gspinf/t207br...2ghxuok2.goose

Thanks for the link Luke, and added info on your other post. That is a great site for T207 that I need to check into closer.

It looks like none of my four Anon. Factory 3 "Recruit Class" cards are that elusive 50th subject. I pass that potential discovery crown to the next collector.

Brian

[LincolnVT]

I was always under the impression that the Red Cross backs were the scarcest, followed by the Red Cycle and Broadleaf back series. Can anyone confirm this? I guess all cards in this set are fairly scarce in comparison to some of the more common T-206 front / back combinations.

[ValKehl]

Originally Posted by Luke

Val, no Wajo is not in that group.

Brian, here is the site I use for my t207 questions. It's Mike's image event site.

https://imageevent.com/gspinf/t207br...2ghxuok2.goose

Luke, many thanks for your most helpful response.

[frohme]

Thank you Luke, you've covered the state as we currently know it pretty well - at least as far as I know it, but there are still a bunch of unknown's in the T207 world, maybe we'll learn more with new discoveries.

As Ron says, there are only 99 known poses with the Anon Factory 3 back - the usual 50 from the Broadleaf class of cards, and 49 from the Recruit class. Lewis no-emblem is also known, so you could say its 100, but that's splitting hairs. The 49 Recruits is just so unsatisfying of a number, that we all want it to be 50 to make a nice tidy bit of symmetry, but one hasn't been found. I think the ideas of print (portrait) quality and coloring go a long way to narrowing it down to a handful of likely suspects for the potential 50th (see #4 below).

In his early 2000's survey published in VCBC#37/38, Tim Newcomb proposed the various "series" of Recruits, and documented 23 of the "Anon 3 Recruits" and hypothesized there might be 50. Following that, others were recorded and the known count was at 44 until a Heritage auction in late 2012 had the full set of 99 Anon factory 3, 49 of which were the ones we have as catalog today. The number of complete subsets of the 49 is at least one - I do not know of others.

In addition to the "missing 50th anon-Recruit", there are other oddities:

1. The relationships (or lack thereof) between the different Recruit back variations is also curious ... there seems to be no overlap (at least so far seen) between Recruits with:

• Anonymous Factory 3
• Blank backs
• Brown-printed/brown-ink backs

I'm sure there will be some overlap found (most likely blank and brown-ink) - both are seeing population growths (or at least new-to-the-current-collectors).

2. The relative population differences of blank-backs between classes:

• Some Recruit poses are known with 2 or 3 copies (Ferry has 3 known, I believe) ... not sure that population of blank-backs are known, but it could be a research project.
• There are only 3 blank-backs known in the entire set of Broadleaf-class cards (Fournier, Ragan, Sweeney).

3. Why are Anon Factory 3 Recruits the most condition-sensitive sub-class of all T207's? At one point (5 or so years ago, maybe?) the highest graded was a PSA3.5/SGC 45. I have no idea whether that has changed, but would be surprised if it had changed much. The same is not entirely true for the Broadleaf-class cards as there are some nice Ex-Mt or better examples.

4. Why do the Recruit cards known with anon factory 3 backs have colorations similar to the broadleaf cards, not the other Recruits? Look at the 'T207 By team' from the ImageEvent site you reference. Its most obvious with the use of blue in Pittsburgh, Washington, and Brooklyn, and red lettering with Boston (both), but other than Rucker, its pretty consistent...

5. Why do the population differences between the Factory 240 and 606 Recruits seem to inversely mirror the relative difficulty (harder Recruits seem to have larger populations of the Factory 606 backs, relatively speaking). That's just my perspective from looking at lots of them... I'd also go out on a limb and say that better examples of harder Recruits are (slightly) more often a factory 606 back.

6. Yes, Ethan, Red Cross is (by far) the most difficult back, with less than 20 total copies known. All are unique except Blackburne (of which two are known). All that said, why do we not have a full confirmed list with visuals of the Napoleon backs? The Napoleon back confirmation thread still shows 11 as unconfirmed, most interestingly all the 'corrected' versions of the Recruit variations remain unconfirmed.

There are lots more things to ponder, but this is already way longer than intended. Thanks for reading all the way to the bottom ... should have put a TL;DR warning and summary at the top.

--
Mike

[frohme]

Here are the Speaker cards ....

[edhans]

Apologies for the wrong information above. Was referencing Lew Lipset's Encyclopedia. 99 does seem like a strange number, but after all these years, I question whether any more will be discovered.