Tag: Mid-Tier Backs

Monthly Mailbag #2: How do Back and Grade Effect T206 Pricing?

A question I had on pricing is: How do you take backs into account for pricing?  I know there are multipliers out there for mid-tier and rare backs.  But, when a card has a low population (5 or less 10 or less ect.) How do you determine prices for those?  How do the prices move as grade goes up?

Im my opinion, there is no easy answer to this question.  While helpful, the back multipliers will almost always be off in one direction or the other in practice.  If you’re trying to price a mid-tier back in order to sell it and you use one of the back multipliers, typically one of two things will happen:  Either it will sell right away because you had it a little too low, or it will just sit there because the back multiplier estimate was too high.

Personally, I have never paid any attention to the multipliers that people have come up with.  Even years ago when I was just getting into buying the tougher backs, I always tried to base values/prices on actual sales.  These days I have seen so much price data over the years that I just kind of know values instinctively.  It took quite a lot of price research and buying/selling to get to where I am now, but anyone can do it.

If you want to get more precise with your value estimates for T206 mid-tier and rare backs, I have a couple of things I would recommend.  First, follow the tougher backs that get listed in auction format on eBay.  Make a guess as to what you think the card will sell for, and then when the auction ends, see how close you got.  I’d recommend keeping notes of all the cards you observe so that you can review them in the future.  You can do the same with any cards that sell via an Auction House.  The second bit of advice is a pay service.  You can pay $4 for 24 hours of access to vintagecardprices.com (VCP).  When I was learning this stuff, I would pay for the 24 hours of access a few times a year, and spend a few hours searching tons of data and taking notes.

Obviously, doing this type of price research is only appealing if you’re really passionate about the mid-tier and rare backs.  If you mainly just collect the T206 set based on fronts, but want a quick way to estimate values, I wish I could be more helpful.  If you find yourself in that situation, I do have a couple bits of advice.  First, you can always ask me for my opinion.  I can be reached here via the “Contact” button on the site, or via net54 (Luke) or Facebook.  Alternatively, it might be worth the $4 to log into vintagecardprices.com (VCP).

Let’s look at an example:  Let’s say you have a Ed Killian Portrait with Cycle 350 back in a PSA 3 holder, and you have no idea what it’s worth.  Here’s what I would suggest you do.  Look up the PSA and SGC Population Reports for Killian.  Then look up a few other players’ Cycle 350 Pop Reports.  This will give you an idea of the relative scarcity of Killian versus other poses in the Cycle 350 subset.  The more poses you can look up, the better.  Then, log on to VCP, and look up sales data on Killian, and all the other poses that you checked Pop Report data for.  While you’re there, I would also check sales data for all the other Cycle 350s.  You’ve already paid for 24 hours of access to VCP, so why not get your money’s worth?  While browsing VCP, make sure to make note of the date that cards sold for.  If you see a card that sold in 2009, I wouldn’t use that piece of data to help you price your card.  Sales from the past couple years will obviously be the most helpful.

One more bit of information to keep in mind is if you happen to be trying to buy or sell the highest graded copy of a given front/back combo, you can expect that card to command a premium.  There’s no magic formula to figuring out the value of the highest graded copy, but it’s something that can be learned in the same way you would learn the value of the Killian Cycle 350 in a PSA 3 holder.

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.