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Originally Posted by JollyElm
Are there any specific facts known about the actual distribution of cards within the packs from the high series? Here's why. There are always great discussions about whether or not the print sheets had SP's involved, and/or how many cards were actually short printed, but there really could be much more to the issue. For instance, like multiple people here indicated, their neck of the woods either didn't get the late series cards, or they only received a limited number of them. The logical conclusion would lead you to believe that Topps didn't print as many cards for the late series and sent a lot of cardboard to the furnaces as they began to concentrate on football, basketball and hockey cards instead.
But which cards got destroyed (or were never distributed)? Was it an equal amount of each card across the series? Or was there something else to it? Were there more cards on the second print sheet that got eliminated? Or maybe the cards appearing on the low end of the sheets, for some reason? In other words, where were the cuts made to decrease the amount of cards printed? If you can see what I'm getting at here, it may help to determine why some cards may NOT appear to be SP's (when looking at uncut sheets), but in reality there were far fewer of them sent out to the stores. Food for thought.
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I think this is unlikely, as I don't think there were 2 sheets used to print a Topps series. The 2 half sheets are different, but they were printed together as one large 264 card sheet before being cut into the 2 easier to manage half sheets and then cut into individual cards. I can't imagine why Topps would print out X number of high series sheets, cut up off the left half of it and distribute, and then throw away most of the right half of the sheet, doubling their print costs to accomplish nothing. If anything, Topps was pretty smart about minimizing costs, shrinking card size and lowering quality after knocking out their competition, experimenting with further size reductions (such as in 1975), being late to adjust to the late 80's increase in quality, etc.
Further, it doesn't seem there actually are cards that are actually that much rarer than the others today. Just cards commanding a lot more money due to a reputation that does not appear to be grounded in fact. It's easy to find 591 or 544 or 598, they aren't that much tougher than any of the others. A 3:4 ratio makes sense with what appears to be available both online and in collections.
It may well be that the way distribution worked made certain cards greater rarities in a specific geographic location; that a high pack may have only had cards from one half sheet (they probably did), and that if one row was on the right side more than the left side, and a pack in Y city/region only had left side cards, it would make certain cards tougher. I would think this would be sequenced (Topps STILL uses sequences today that make it easy to predict the next card in the pack if one has opened enough of them) and would balance out in the next box, but who knows.