Tag: American Beauty

Cycle 460: Overlooked and Undervalued (Part Three): Cycle 460 v.s. American Beauty 350 No Frame

This week I’m going to be taking a look at how the Cycle 460 subset compares to the American Beauty 350 No Frame subset.  T206resource.com has American Beauty 350 No Frame as the 15th scarcest back in the T206 set, and Cycle 460 as the 17th.  It’s important to remember that back scarcity lists such as the one posted on T206resource.com are an attempt to list the backs in order of aggregate scarcity.  In other words, this list is simply saying less American Beauty 350 No Frame backs exist than Cycle 460 backs.

Attempting to compare the overall populations of these two backs is a little bit tricky because the checklists are of such dissimliar size.  As mentioned in Part Two of this series, the Cycle 460 Subset consists of 109 different poses, while there are only 37 poses in the American Beauty 350 No Frame checklist.  What this means is that there are 2.95 times (but I’ll round it up to 3x for simplicity’s sake) more poses in the Cycle 460 subset than in the American Beauty 350 No Frame Subset.  So, in order for these two backs to have a similar total population, the average individual American Beauty 350 No Frame pose would have to be about 3 times as plentiful as the average Cycle 460 pose.

My Hypothesis:

That 3:1 ratio actually sounded about right to me before I began to research the Pop Report.  I expecting to find a ratio at or around 3:1 and it wouldn’t have surprised me to find that it was even higher (meaning that Cycle 460 backs are scarcer than American Beauty 350 No Frame).  Let’s take a look at the table below to see what the actual results look like.

Links to checklists, courtesy of t206resource.com:

Cycle 460

American Beauty 350 No Frame

Explanation of Research*:

In Part Two of this series, when comparing Brown Hindu Populations to Cycle 460 Populations, I had to use two different poses of the same player.  This is because there is no crossover between poses in the Brown Hindu and Cycle 460 subsets.  Brown Hindu backs were printed exclusively on 150-350 Series subjects in 1909 while Cycle 460 backs were printed in 1911 and feature only poses from the 350-460 Series, 460 Only Series, and the Super Prints.

The research for this article is a bit more straightforward, because we can look at a single pose rather than two different poses featuring the same player.  36 of the 37 poses in the American Beauty 350 No Frame Subset were also printed with a Cycle 460 back**.  Unfortunately I wasn’t able to use PSA Pop Report data for all 36 poses.  Most of the poses that were printed with an American Beauty 350 No Frame back were also printed with an American Beauty 460 back.  Because PSA used a generic “American Beauty” label for a number of years, it’s impossible to get reliable Pop Report data for the players who were printed with both backs***.  This meant I had to use just the poses in the American Beauty 350 No Frame Subset that were not also printed with an American Beauty 460 back.  That left me with the 15 poses in the table below.

As you can see, the PSA Population of American Beauty 350 No Frames outnumber Cycle 460s 148 to 65, for a ratio of 2.28:1.  This falls short of the 3:1 ratio required for the total Populations of each back to be roughly equal.  I was expecting to find the Cycle 460 Population marginally scarcer than American Beauty 350 No Frame. However, the results strongly indicate that American Beauty 350 No Frame backs are indeed scarcer than Cycle 460 backs.

*Throughout this series of articles, I have used only the PSA Pop Reports to test the hypothesis.  I chose to do this for a couple different reasons.  First, the PSA Pop Report is a little easier (and quicker) to use when checking a number of different players with the same back.  Secondly, there can be some confusion on the SGC Pop Reports when a player has one pose that was printed with a Brown Hindu back and another pose that was printed with a Red Hindu back.  The same holds true for American Beauty 350 With Frame & American Beauty 350 No Frame.  I wanted to have data that was completely uniform and I didn’t want to use any entry that included any ambiguity.

**The lone exception is Simon Nichols batting, which was pulled from production before Cycle 460 backs were printed.

***In a previous article entitled “Understanding the American Beauty backs: T206 American Beauty 350 no frame (Part 3/4)“, I used both the PSA and SGC Pop Reports in order to make an educated guess at the total graded population of each pose in the American Beauty 350 No Frame subset.

Cycle 460: Overlooked and Undervalued (Part One)

It seems to me that Cycle 460s don’t get the respect they deserve.  Over the last few years, I’ve felt that I was seeing Cycle 460s less often than the other “mid-tier” backs such as Hindu, Piedmont Factory 42, and American Beauty 350 No Frame.  So I decided to do some research to see if my observations were supported by the Pop Reports.

In this series, I’ll be focusing on the scarcest of the “Mid-Tier Backs”, that is:

Tier 1 Backs:
  • American Beauty 460
  • Cycle 460
  • Piedmont 350-460 Factory 42*
Tier 2 Backs:
  • American Beauty 350 No Frame
  • Brown Hindu

In my opinion, there is a clear divide between these 5 backs** and the backs above and below them in terms of scarcity.  There is a large gap in scarcity and value between any of these 5 backs and Carolina Brights, which is significantly scarcer and more valuable.  Likewise, I feel there is a gap below these 5 backs before you get to Tolstoi and Sovereign 460.

A couple of weeks back, I published a two-part article which gave an overview of the “Mid-Tier” Backs, which can be read by clicking the links below:

A Look at the “Mid-Tier” T206 Backs: Tier 1

A Look at the “Mid-Tier” T206 Backs: Tiers 2 & 3

Here are the back scarcity rankings from T206resource.com.  This is a really well put together list, and it’s a great place to start.  I think collectors as a whole have overlooked Cycle 460 and it’s my contention that it needs to move up four or five rungs on this list (and others like it).  I’d also move Sovereign 460 down a couple rungs, but I agree with the vast majority of this list.

Before I get into the research, there are a couple of points I want to address:

First, not all of the mid-tier backs are easy to analyze.  American Beauty 460 is an odd subset because there are 12 poses that are quite easy to find, while the rest of the poses range from tough-to-find to near impossible.  This makes is hard to compare American Beauty 460 to Cycle 460 backs, which have a much more even distribution.  American Beauty 350 No Frame offers a different challenge in terms of comparison.  The AB 350nf subset contains only 37 cards, which is 34% the size of the Cycle 460 checklist (109 cards).

In an aggregate sense, the two backs may have similar scarcity.   However, when looking at specific poses, there will typically be two or three times as many cards with AB350nf backs in the Pop Report than Cycle 460s of the same pose.  This makes it tough to compare Cycle 460 and AB350nf, but I tackle that challenge anyway in Part Three of this series.  In addition, Piedmont 350-460 Factory 42 backs have not been catalogued very well by PSA or SGC over the years, so neither Pop Report is of much use in researching this back.

Secondly, the way the PSA and SGC Pop Reports are set up makes it easy to research certain things but difficult to research others.  For instance it’s difficult to get accurate PSA Pop numbers for a Cycle 460 Chance Yellow Portrait, because PSA used a generic “Cycle” label for a few years, so it’s impossible to know which of those are Cycle 350 and which are Cycle 460.  You run into the same problem for all the poses that have both AB350nf and AB460 backs.  The SGC Pop Report presents a different challenge.  It is easy to tell an AB350nf from an AB460 because the former will be labeled “1910” and the latter “1911”.  However, if a player has two different poses and one was printed with American Beauty 350 With Frame and the other was printed with American Beauty 350 No Frame, it will often be impossible to differentiate between the two in the SGC Pop Report.

Using Pop Reports in an attempt to prove hypotheses can be a little problematic because not all cards in existence have been slabbed, and not all slabbed cards correctly indicate the back.  However, I feel that if you compare two like subject groups and the sample size is large enough, Pop Report data can be very accurate and useful.  You’ll see in Part Two of this series how I use just PSA Pop Report Data and I am able to prove my hypothesis without any doubt due to the sample size and the results of my research.

In this series, I am attempting to answer the following questions:

  • “Which of the Mid-Tier backs is the scarcest?”
  • “What is the order of scarcity for these 5 Mid-Tier backs we are looking at?”

Please stay tuned for the rest of this series:

  • Part Two:  Cycle 460 v.s. Brown Hindu
  • Part Three:  Cycle 460 v.s. American Beauty 350 no frame
  • Part Four:  Cycle 460 v.s. American Beauty 460

*Ideally there would be a Part Five, where I compare Cycle 460 to Piedmont Factory 42, but the lack of Pop Report Data available for Piedmont Factory 42 means I have no way to present any meaningful findings with regard to that back.

**I also think Sweet Caporal 350-460 Factory 25 belongs somewhere in this conversation, but the lack of data available makes that impossible.  Additionally, the fact that collectors don’t care too much about this back makes them fly under the radar even more.

A Twist on the Back Run: Player Runs

Like any other T206 collector, I love a good back run.  They’re a fun, challenging way to add some variety to a collection.  However, there are a few aspects of working on a back run that can be make it tough to see the project through to completion:  Collectors with large budgets will often target a very tough 350-460 Series or Super Print subject as their pose of choice.  Money won’t be an object, but availability certainly will.  Waiting over a decade for your specific pose to show up with Drum or Broad Leaf 460 back seems like it would really put the damper on the fun of working on a back run.

For a smaller budget collector like myself, there are other potential roadblocks to consider.  First, tying up a significant amount of money into multiple cards of one player can be hard to justify at times when other desirable cards come to market.  I’ve started a few back runs that never reached completion because I sold one or more of the cards in order to pay for a different T206 that I wanted more.  The longer it takes to complete the back run, the more chances you’ll have to decide you might rather have something else than complete the project.

The other problem has to do with the project itself.  A smaller budget collector is probably going to choose a 150-350 Series subject for their back run simply as a matter of finances.  You could also target a 350 Series player who doesn’t have a Drum, but then you’re still going to need a Carolina Brights and/or a Broad Leaf 350 which are not cheap.  A 150-350 Series back run makes the most sense, but it can be a little mundane.  I recently abandoned a Dode Criss back run while lacking only the Sweet Caporal 150 Factory 25 because I had just lost interest.  Granted, Criss is one of the easiest 150-350 back runs because their is no Hindu or EPDG to track down.  However the largest back runs from the 150-350 Series (Bresnahan Portrait or Johnson Portrait for example) only have 12 front/back combos, and 7 of them are either Piedmont or Sweet Caporal backs.  Needing that many common backs* can get boring, at least it has to me on a few occasions.  I’m sure there are plenty of people who have completed such a project without giving up at some point, but I know of many such back runs that have never been seen through to completion.

Once I realized that I wasn’t likely to complete a back run anytime soon, I came up with a different way of looking at back collecting.  I would much rather have 12 different mid-tier front/back combos than 12 different backs of the same pose.  With that in mind, I started to try to acquire the scarcest back (or the scarcest back I could afford) or each pose for a certain player.  Obviously this only makes sense for players who have multiple poses in the T206 set, but thankfully there are plenty of them.

The Bender run below features his toughest Portrait, second scarcest With Trees (Broad Leaf 350 is harder to find), and the tough Cycle 460 No Trees (there are a few tougher front/back combos with for this pose, but I can’t afford most of them).

The Bender run was on the expensive side, but this can also be a fun way to collect on a budget.  This Mullin run below cost me around $400 to complete.  None of these are the very scarcest back for the pose, but the Cycles are pretty hard to find.

Gallery:

*Not all Sweet Caporal backs are easy to find, but it can be hard to know which ones are tougher to find because most collectors aren’t interested in the  different Factory Numbers, and Pop Report numbers are not helpful.

A Look at the “Mid-Tier” T206 Backs: Tier 1

There is a lot of confusion and misinformation out there about what exactly constitutes a “T206 Rare Back”.  If you do an eBay search for T206s right now, you’ll find dozens of listings using the word “Rare” to promote a card that really isn’t.  If you’ve been collecting T206s for a number of years, you probably have a pretty good handle on the respective scarcities of the various T206 backs.  Like most aspects of the set, the best way to learn the intricacies of the different backs is by handling a bunch of cards and spending a little bit of time most days looking at online listings and auctions.  For me it took 4 or 5 years before I felt like I had a good understanding of aggregate and relative back scarcity.

This two-part article will be more helpful to new collectors than seasoned ones, but I think there is a little something for even the most advanced collectors.  For collectors who are just becoming interested in the rare and mid-tier backs, the Back Scarcity Rankings that can be found online can be very helpful, but they only tell part of the story.  These lists are designed to show you which backs are the scarcest, in an aggregate sense.  For the most part, they deliver very useful information.  For instance, it’s very important to know how rare a Uzit or Lenox back is, so that if you happen to find one, you will know that you should try to pick it up because it might be years before you have another shot at one.

However, those types of scenarios are more pipe dream than reality.  The more likely scenario is something like this:  Someone posts a bunch of T206s on ebay.  Most of them have a Piedmont back, but one has an American Beauty 460 back and another has a Tolstoi back.  Going by the Back Scarcity Rankings, you’d assume that the American Beauty 460 would be the card to acquire (assuming you can’t get both).  But in reality, it could go either way.  There are common American Beauty 460s and rare Tolstois.  In this article, I’ll attempt to shed some light on relative scarcity and scarcity within each back subset.

These are the “Rare Backs” of the T206 set:

  • Brown Old Mill
  • Brown Lenox
  • Broad Leaf 460
  • Drum
  • Uzit
  • Red Hindu
  • Black Lenox
  • Broad Leaf 350
  • Blank Back
  • Carolina Brights

There is a pretty big gap between the rarity of Carolina Brights and the next rarest back.  I believe Cycle 460 is the next rarest back (and I will delve further into this in a couple weeks) but you could argue for American Beauty 460 as well.

Here are the “Mid-Tier” backs, separated into three tiers based on rarity.  Within each tier, they are listed in alphabetical order:

Tier 1:

American Beauty 460
Cycle 460
Piedmont 350-460 Factory 42

Tier 2:

American Beauty 350 No Frame
Brown Hindu
Sweet Caporal 350-460 Factory 25

Tier 3:

American Beauty 350 with frame
Cycle 350
El Principe de Gales
Old Mill (Base Ball Subjects)
Sovereign 150
Sovereign 350 Green Apple
Sovereign 460
Tolstoi

Tier 1:

American Beauty 460

There are either 74 or 75 cards in the American Beauty 460 Subset*.  The subset is comprised of poses from the 350-460 Series as well as the 460 Only Series.  In an aggregate sense, AB460 is one of the three scarcest Mid-Tier backs, but the individual distribution has an odd twist to it.  12 of the poses are pretty easy to find, while the others range from scarce to near impossible-to-find.  These 12 poses are plentiful in comparison to the others:

-Crandall with cap
-Devore
-Duffy
-Ford
-Gandil
-Geyer
-Hummel
-McGraw glove at hip
-Pfeffer
-Sheckard glove showing
-Tannehill on front
-Wheat

These 12 poses tend to sell for less than other American Beauty 460 poses.  There are some AB460 poses that haven’t come to market in a number of years,  Prices can be very strong for the rarest front/back combos.

Cycle 460

There are 109 poses in the Cycle 460 Subset.  This is in my opinion the scarcest of all the Mid-Tier backs.  This article is meant to set the stage for a number of more research intensive pieces that will be published in the near future.  Look for an in-depth series on Cycle 460s to come in the next few weeks, entitled “T206 Cycle 460 Backs: Overlooked and Undervalued”.  In this series, I will show in detail, why I believe Cycle 460 to be the rarest of all Mid-Tier backs, slotting in just behind Carolina Brights on the overall Back Scarcity Rankings.

Cycle 460 backs appear to follow a normal distribution.  That is, some poses are more plentiful than others, but it is likely just due to chance and the randomness of which cards survived all these years.

Piedmont 350-460 Factory 42

This is clearly one of the scarcest Mid-Tier backs, but it is hard to study them because the grading companies have not recorded them until recently.  Someone who has been collecting backs and paying attention to the market for the last 20 years would have a much better idea of their aggregate scarcity than I do.  My strengths lie in analyzing the data that is available to us, mainly in the form of Population Reports.  I feel that Piedmont 350-460 Factory 42 backs are slightly scarcer than Brown Hindu, but it’s probably very close either way.  Piedmont Factory 42 is the least scarce of the Tier 1 backs, and Brown Hindu is the scarcest back in Tier 2.

A big thanks to the guys at T206resource.com for the use of their invaluable checklists.

*There is a question of whether Ames Hands Above Head was actually printed with an American Beauty 460 back or not.

Understanding the American Beauty backs: T206 American Beauty 460 (Part 4/4)

American Beauty 460 backs were released in 1911, at the tail end of T206 production.  Poses from Print Groups Three, Four, and Five are represented in the AB 460 subset.  As you can see, they share the same design with American Beauty 350 no frame (which I discussed in Part 3 of this series).

American Beauty 460 is the scarcest American Beauty back in terms of overall population.  It ranks 13th on the Back Scarcity Rankings at t206resource.com.  American Beauty 350 no frame is 15th and American Beauty 350 with frame is 21st.  Individual subjects with American Beauty 460 backs are also typically more scarce than a single pose with either AB350w/f or AB350nf.  There are a few exceptions to this rule (12 to be exact) that I will discuss in a moment.

Here is the complete American Beauty 460 checklist:

Many of these cards are extremely scarce.  However, there are a group of 12 poses which were printed in much greater quantities with American Beauty 460 backs than the other poses in the subset:

Crandall with cap
Devore
Duffy
Ford
Gandil
Geyer
Hummel
McGraw glove at hip
Pfeffer
Sheckard glove showing
Tannehill on front
Wheat

These 12 poses were dubbed “The Exclusive 12” in 2013 by collector Ted Zanidakis in a post on net54baseball.com (which you can read here).  They probably are a subject for another post, but suffice it say they are relatively easy with American Beauty 460 and Tolstoi backs, but tougher than you would expect with EPDG and Polar Bear backs.

American Beauty 460 backs sell for more than any other American Beauty backs (with the exception of the 12 players listed above).  Many of the subjects who are not part of the “Exclusive 12” have extremely low known populations.  If you play with the PSA Pop Report, (which I explained how to use in this post) you will find many that have Pops of zero, one, or two.

Thank you as always to t206resource.com for the use of their checklists.

Understanding the American Beauty backs: T206 American Beauty 350 no frame (Part 3/4)

T206 Jordan American Beauty 350 no frame

There are 37 different poses in the American Beauty 350 no frame checklist.  This subset was released in 1910 and consists entirely of poses from the 350-460 series (also referred to as Print Group 3).  It’s easy to confuse the two American Beauty 350 backs.  There are two important distinctions.  First, AB350nf backs tend to sell for more than a AB350w/f back in similar condition.  The reason: There are only 37 cards with AB350nf backs and 190 AB350w/f backs.  So, in the aggregate, AB350nf is the scarcer back.  However, when you are looking for a specific pose with either an AB350nf or an AB350w/f back, you will likely have a harder time finding the AB350w/f.  This is because, on average, a specific pose from the AB350w/f checklist is scarcer than a specific pose from the AB350nf checklist.  To put it in simpler terms:  The average combined PSA & SGC pop report totals for a given AB350nf card are greater than 10.  For AB350w/f, the average combined total is less than 10.

T206 American Beauty 350 no frame checklist

19 of the 37 cards in this subset were also printed with American Beauty 460 backs.  This can be confusing because sometimes you will see a listing for one of these cards that simply states the back is an American Beauty back, but does not tell you whether it is a 350 or 460 back.  These 19 poses exist with both AB350nf and AB460 backs, but are much scarcer and more valuable with the AB460 back:

  • Burch fielding
  • Conroy with bat
  • Crawford with bat
  • Jennings two hands showing
  • Jordan batting
  • Lake St. Louis, no ball
  • Leifield batting
  • Manning pitching
  • McQuillan with bat
  • Mullin with bat
  • Overall hand at face level
  • Pelty vertical
  • Pfeister throwing
  • Steinfeldt with bat
  • Wagner bat on right shoulder
  • Wilhelm with bat
  • Willetts
  • Willis batting
  • Wiltse pitching

Of course, this means that 18 of the poses in the AB350nf subset do not exist with AB460 back.  For these 18 cards, it is easier to read the SGC and PSA pop reports and get a feel for how many copies have been graded.  SGC and PSA have not always differentiated between the two backs.  This makes it tough to get a handle on the true populations of AB350nf versus AB460 for the group of 19 above.  I went through both the PSA and SGC Pop Reports and attempted to compile the combined Pop Report totals for each of the 37 cards in the AB350nf subset.  This proved to be more difficult than I had imagined.  For all of the 19 poses listed above, there are generic entries which could be either AB350nf or AB460 backs.  We know that they are far more likely to represent a AB350nf back, but we can’t be sure.

T206 American Beauty Simple Pop Reports

The table above shows the results of my research into the SGC and PSA Pop Report Numbers for every card in the American Beauty 350 no frame subset.  Because both PSA and SGC have generic American Beauty listings, it is impossible to know with 100% certainty how many of each pose are in each Pop Report.  However, it is possible to look at all the numbers and make a reliable guesstimate.  The table below shows the work I used to arrive at the estimates above.  As you can see, there are 15 poses in the table below that do not have any ambiguous entries.  For those 15, we have the exact Pop Report numbers.  For the other 22, I have made an educated guess.   For the cards in the AB350nf subset that also exist with an AB460 back, we know that the AB350nf will be far more plentiful.  Somewhere in the neighborhood of a 4:1 ratio.  This is how I arrived at my estimates.  If there are 10 generic American Beauty backs in the PSA Pop Report, I have estimated that 2 of them will be AB460 backs, and 8 of them will be AB350nf backs.

T206 American Beauty 350 pop report comparison

This data shows that the individual cards in this subset are not particularly rare.  Steinfeldt has the lowest Pop, at an estimated 10 copies.  There are plenty of Old Mill, Tolstoi, AB350w/f, and Cycle 350 front/back combos that are more scarce than any card in the AB350nf subset.  But, demand for this back remains high.  A few of these cards have relatively high Pop numbers, but I don’t recall seeing a single copy for sale in the last couple years.  Apparently they are out there, but they don’t change hands often.

Thanks to t206resource.com for the use of their checklists.

Understanding the American Beauty backs: T206 American Beauty 350 with frame (Part 2/4)

T206 Davy Jones American Beauty 350 with frame PSA 4

American Beauty 350 with frame is the most straight-forward of all the AB subsets.  The checklist consists of 190 different poses.  As a result, it is easier to list the “no-prints” here than the full checklist.  184 of the cards in the AB350w/f checklist come from Print Group 2.  Print group 2 consists of 202 cards.  This leaves these 18 poses that were not printed with an AB350w/f back:

T206 American Beauty 350 with frame no prints

It’s not readily apparent why most of these players were excluded from the AB350w/f print run.  Demmitt STL and O’Hara STL are the two that make sense, because we know the team name changes were made near the end of 350 series production, and they were only printed with Polar Bear backs.

That covers 184 of the 190 cards in the subset.  The other 6 are the “Super Prints”, also known as Print Group 5.  The Super Prints are an interesting subset that have their own rules.  They were printed with more backs than any other poses in the entire set.  I will most likely devote an entire post to them at some point.  As you can see, all 6 were very popular players at the time:

print-group-5-checklist

As I said in Part One of this series, there are more T206s with AB350w/f backs in existence than AB350nf backs.  The reason is that AB350w/f were printed on 190 different poses while AB350nf backs were printed on only 37 poses.  So, if you just want one copy of each back and you don’t care who is on the front, you’ll have an easier time finding the AB350w/f.  You’ll also most likely pay less.

One thing that many collectors do not realize is that individual poses with AB350w/f backs are usually more scarce than their AB350nf counterparts.  I think the best way to illustrate this is with an example.  There are 8 players who have one pose that was printed with AB350w/f back and another with AB350nf back.  If you were working on player back runs for any of these players, you would most likely find the AB350w/f back tougher to locate.  4 of those players also were printed with AB460 backs.  I will exclude them from the example because their Pop Reports are harder to read.  PSA only recently started to differentiate between AB350nf and AB460 backs, so our Pop Report Results would be suspect if I were to include those 4 players.  Here is the list of the remaining 4 players, along with PSA and SGC pop report numbers for each front/back combo*.

T206 American Beauty Pop Report Comparison

This example serves as a fairly random sampling of cards from each subset.  As you can see, each card on the AB350w/f list is more scarce than the AB350nf pose.  To get a better idea of the Pop Reports for cards with each back, play around a little bit with the PSA and SGC Pop Reports.

Some poses are very tough to find with AB350w/f and command a premium over the more common subjects.  Thielman (2 combined in PSA & SGC Pop Reports) and Herbie Moran (3 combined in PSA & SGC Pop Reports) are a couple examples.  There are also some subjects that are pretty easy to find.  The best tool we have to help us judge scarcity is the Pop Reports, so I recommend using them to help you make a buying or selling decision.

*-For each of these players, the SGC Pop Report also lists a generic “American Beauty” back.  Since these cards could be either pose, I simply excluded them from the results.

Thank you to T206resource.com for allowing me to use their checklists.

Understanding the T206 American Beauty backs: Overview (Part 1/4)

T206 American Beauty backs

Understanding the American Beauty backs can be a challenge, so I’m going to go into detail here and hopefully answer any questions that you may have.  As always, please send me a message via the “contact” button if you have any questions or suggestions.

There are three distinct and different American Beauty backs:

-American Beauty 350 with frame (AB350w/f)
-American Beauty 350 no frame (AB350nf)
-American Beauty 460 (AB460)

The three backs represent distinct portions of the T206 print run, and are almost always mutually exclusive.  This means that when a certain pose exists with one American Beauty back, it will not exist with any others (there are 19 exceptions to this rule within the AB350nf and AB460 checklists, which I will get to in Part Three).

Pricing:

In general, AB460 backs sell for the most, followed by AB350nf and then AB350w/f.  I’ll explain why and talk about exceptions to the rule.

Scarcity:

This is how they rank on the T206resource.com back scarcity list:

T206 back scarcity rankings from T206resource.com

Where each back lies in scarcity rankings is largely due to the size of each checklist.  It makes sense that there are less AB350nf backs out there than AB350w/f, simply because the latter were printed with 5 times as many fronts.  As you can see from the graphic below, AB460 is more scarce than AB350nf despite being printed on twice as many fronts (75 AB460 to 37 AB350nf).  The reason for this is that there are some truly rare cards in the AB460 checklist.  The same cannot be said for the AB350nf subset.

T206 American Beauty 350 & 460 checklists

It’s important to note that this is a broad overview, and that individual cards within these series can range from very scarce to somewhat common.  I will go into more detail in the rest of this series, but here is an example to show what I mean:

Gabby Street’s portrait can be found with a AB350w/f back.  Gabby Street’s catching pose can be found with a AB350nf back.  If you just looked at the overall scarcity rankings, you would assume that the catching pose would be the tougher card to find.  In this case, that would be incorrect.  PSA lists 8 Street catching with AB350nf backs and only 5 Street portraits with AB350w/f backs.

T206 Gabby Street American Beauty

Stay tuned for Parts 2 through 4 of this series where I’ll build upon this framework by taking an in-depth look at each American Beauty back.

Thanks to Ted Z. for pointing out an error in the first draft of this article.

Thanks as always to the guys at T206resource.com for allowing me to use their checklists.