I’ve owned 2 Steinerts as well. I think T218-2 was probably produced on 2 sheets (possibly a separate run of Johnson’s, I’m pretty confident Johnson Green with him facing the opposite way was it’s own sheet in the late series 1 production), and one of them is notably more common in Tolstoi (these same cards do not appear to be super printed in other backs). I’m pretty sure the Tolstoi scarcity disparity is a big clue to the sheet layouts but the lack of a single miscut (at least I’ve never seen a T218-2 that one can tell what the adjacent card is) is a pain for figuring much out.
I’ve got rid of all the dupes I’ve come into over the last few years, and sitting at 41 uniques. Even the more common half is darn tough. There’s a group of them that just seem to change hands every couple years and come up for sale over and over. I don’t think I've seen more than ten unique examples of any card, though there’s surely much more than that. I often wonder if we see 5% of the extant examples crop up on the forums and in sales venues, or if it’s 50%. Relative scarcity is a lot easier than true scarcity. The T218 Tolstoi’s have an entry in the ATC journal but must have had a very brief print run. Tolstoi is not that tough of a back in all the other sets it produced (T79, T206, T220, probably forgetting some), and fairly common for some (T80).
|