Thank you Luke, you've covered the state as we currently know it pretty well - at least as far as I know it, but there are still a bunch of unknown's in the T207 world, maybe we'll learn more with new discoveries.
As Ron says, there are only 99 known poses with the Anon Factory 3 back - the usual 50 from the Broadleaf class of cards, and 49 from the Recruit class. Lewis no-emblem is also known, so you could say its 100, but that's splitting hairs. The 49 Recruits is just so unsatisfying of a number, that we all want it to be 50 to make a nice tidy bit of symmetry, but one hasn't been found. I think the ideas of print (portrait) quality and coloring go a long way to narrowing it down to a handful of likely suspects for the potential 50th (see #4 below).
In his early 2000's survey published in VCBC#37/38, Tim Newcomb proposed the various "series" of Recruits, and documented 23 of the "Anon 3 Recruits" and hypothesized there might be 50. Following that, others were recorded and the known count was at 44 until a Heritage auction in late 2012 had the full set of 99 Anon factory 3, 49 of which were the ones we have as catalog today. The number of complete subsets of the 49 is at least one - I do not know of others.
In addition to the "missing 50th anon-Recruit", there are other oddities:
1. The relationships (or lack thereof) between the different Recruit back variations is also curious ... there seems to be no overlap (at least so far seen) between Recruits with:
- Anonymous Factory 3
- Blank backs
- Brown-printed/brown-ink backs
I'm sure there will be some overlap found (most likely blank and brown-ink) - both are seeing population growths (or at least new-to-the-current-collectors).
2. The relative population differences of blank-backs between classes:
- Some Recruit poses are known with 2 or 3 copies (Ferry has 3 known, I believe) ... not sure that population of blank-backs are known, but it could be a research project.
- There are only 3 blank-backs known in the entire set of Broadleaf-class cards (Fournier, Ragan, Sweeney).
3. Why are Anon Factory 3 Recruits the most condition-sensitive sub-class of all T207's? At one point (5 or so years ago, maybe?) the highest graded was a PSA3.5/SGC 45. I have no idea whether that has changed, but would be surprised if it had changed much. The same is not entirely true for the Broadleaf-class cards as there are some nice Ex-Mt or better examples.
4. Why do the Recruit cards known with anon factory 3 backs have colorations similar to the broadleaf cards, not the other Recruits? Look at the '
T207 By team' from the ImageEvent site you reference. Its most obvious with the use of blue in Pittsburgh, Washington, and Brooklyn, and red lettering with Boston (both), but other than Rucker, its pretty consistent...
5. Why do the population differences between the Factory 240 and 606 Recruits seem to inversely mirror the relative difficulty (harder Recruits seem to have larger populations of the Factory 606 backs, relatively speaking). That's just my perspective from looking at lots of them... I'd also go out on a limb and say that better examples of harder Recruits are (slightly) more often a factory 606 back.
6. Yes, Ethan, Red Cross is (by far) the most difficult back, with less than 20 total copies known. All are unique except Blackburne (of which two are known). All that said, why do we not have a full confirmed list with visuals of the Napoleon backs? The
Napoleon back confirmation thread still shows 11 as unconfirmed, most interestingly all the 'corrected' versions of the Recruit variations remain unconfirmed.
There are lots more things to ponder, but this is already way longer than intended. Thanks for reading all the way to the bottom ... should have put a TL;DR warning and summary at the top.
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Mike