Ranking of T206 Rarities

[t213]

About 20 years ago I sold a group of close to 50 raw T215s (memory serves, roughly 40% type 1s / 60% type 2s). I believe this collector still owns the entire group and is unlikely to sell. Yes, selling this group is my collecting nightmare that haunts me to this day.

[brass_rat]

Hey Andy,

Not to put a picture to your nightmares, but is this the group? I saw this a couple weeks ago when flipping through a 1999 Mastro catalog.

Steve

[G1911]

There were no blue old mills for a century. Now there are 3. It’s hardly the only T card for which this kind of thing has happened (T220 Silver Donovan went from 0 in 2005 to 12 today). There’s still a lot unknown, we see new things come to market all the time. I buy cards/collections every year that have never been seen by collectors before and I’m an unimportant poor collector. There are surely more we haven’t seen.

If I had a Wagner I wouldn’t pay to grade it (what does PSA charge to grade one? They scale with value so it must be many thousands) nor would I post it anywhere. If I had a $3 million card I’d shut the hell up and never tell a soul. I doubt I’m the only one, it’s a small chunk of the hobby that makes their stuff public.

[t213]

That wasn't my T215 group. I sold mine in late 2001 or early 2002. I did have a type 1 Matty white cap, no Cobbs, Johnson or Youngs though. I had many HOF in both types though.

[Hankphenom]

A nifty piece of research would be to list the dates that known Wagners came to be known. If it's been a serious trickle for a while, like one per decade the last few decades, I doubt many more will be coming out, maybe a handful over the next fifty to a hundred years, one or two more in the next five hundred years, and that will be that. And what about ones realistically rumored to be known but never surfaced publicly, is there any accounting of those? I can remember one of the Michalowitz (sp?) brothers--Joe, maybe?--introducing himself to me at a show around D.C. I was set up at sometime in the 90s, and we got to talking about his Wagner, and he said casually, "My brother has two of them." He invited me to come down to Petersburg, Virginia, to see their collections, but I never got around to it. I did verify, though, through serious old-time collector friends, that they were the real deal. I've probably gotten some of the details wrong in my slipping memory, and perhaps the existence and disposition of their cards is well known to the hobby, but it does make me wonder where anecdotal evidence of the existence of Wagners and other uber-rare cards might fit into this discussion.