Posted By:
Colt McClellandMy personal opinion (as someone who has been collecting E cards for a while) is that the "condition" scarcity issue is much less of an issue than the basic scarcity issue (i.e. scarcity regardless of condition) when it comes to E cards vs. T cards. There are certainly high graded E cards out there. We don't see them very often, but we don't see a lot of E cards very often in any grade. The bottom line (imo) is that E cards in general are much more scarce than T cards, and it logically follows that high grade E cards are much more scarce than high grade T cards. I really don't think it has anything to do with who collected/discarded/etc. any of these cards back in the day. I just think that E cards are much more scarce than T cards in general, and therefore high grade E cards are much more scarce than high grade T cards. I think the number of cards we see on ebay day in and day out supports this.
As an aside, I think that the "E card bubble" that some have tried to explain/understand is nothing more than the value of E cards getting in line with the scarcity of E cards. E cards are very attractive, desirable cards to collectors, and they slid unnoticed, undervalued, and under the radar screen for years. The advent of the internet, Ebay, as well as the introduction of a whole new generation of pre-war collectors has brought E cards out of the dark and led to a more accurate valuation.
All of this is simply one collector's opinion, of course, and I invite some of the more veteran pre-war collectors to poke holes in my comments. That is what makes this N54 forum fun, after all.