Quote:
Originally Posted by nat
Others may disagree, but I think Engel's rarity ratings are best thought of as falling along a spectrum from "these things are all over the place" to "these don't come up much", rather than as a strict numerical population report. There's just no way to tell how many of any given card are out there.
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Totally agree. In fact, I wrote this exact thing in an email earlier today. Barring a big tranche of a particular issue being unearthed, I think the Engel's rarity ratings are very useful as a -relative- metric. Was really just getting at the fact that the absolute numbers were probably not really representative of reality.
And your point about the number of sets is well taken, the math makes sense. That said, since I buy almost only HOF players (or those that I recognize, an even more limited subset) unless I'm building a set, I'm still pretty amazed at the number of R5 cards that come up regularly.
BTW, I've enjoyed your HOF collection thread as much as any I've read. That must have been fun. Cheers!