Scarcity Tiers in the E105 Mello-Mint set

E105 Mello-Mint is an interesting set. We know that some of the cards (eg. Knight, Young, Lajoie, Bescher) show up far more frequently than others (eg. Cobb). As Jay mentioned in another thread, there was a find in the early 90's that uncovered many multiples of Knight, Young, and Lajoie without the common vertical crease. I believe Mark Macrae handled a good number of these cards at the time of that find, which contributed to the imbalanced population numbers that we see today.

I thought it would be interesting to see if we can compile a E105 scarcity ranking in tiers. I realize this can't be an exact poll, but maybe we can clear a few things up about the scarcity of some of the cards. I don't have the psa/sgc population report data on hand - maybe someone could post that as well. While it's not comprehensive by any means, it could help in giving us a clearer idea of the tiers.

I'll start our ranking with the obvious ones, along with a few speculative picks which hopefully people can add to (please correct me if you think my starter list is off):


E105 MELLO-MINT, 50 CARDS


1. Most Commonly found: Knight

2. Commonly found: Young, Lajoie, Bescher, Hartsel
-------------------------------------------------------------------------below is where I need some help
3. Somewhat Scarce: Chance, Mcgraw, Gibson

4. Scarce: Not sure. Matty?

5. Extremely Scarce: Cobb?


I welcome your thoughts and speculations...

Mark is the one that picked up that collection. I was lucky enough to cherry pick a Young, Lajoie and few other cards from the lot. I think the Wagner is pretty rare too with only a few examples known.

Jay

Here is my one not sure where it fits in. The centering is the only problem.



Lee

Not much to add on the cards, but here is a wrapper - I believe only 1 of 2 known to exist

cool rman, look like wrigley's gum. so i'm thinking some of these weren't folded and some were?

i don't know if the e105s have a similar checklist to the e92 dockmans but have all of them been catalogued? i don't pay attention to the commons but i don't remember seeing a chase with a mello mint back (maybe vcp will prove me wrong). it would be cool to own an e105 cobb. i think that card will bring us out of recession, and the wagner throwing is allegedly tough but i wouldn't know since i never got mine.

edited to add: imo there are the super commons knight bescher lajoie young hartsel and then there are some that's equally tough but we only notice the big names like cobb/matty/wagner...like when's the last time u saw a horizontal seigle or a davis e105 cards like that? and by equally tough i don't mean a finite # for each but the difference can't be more than a handful.

Here's my example. Sorry, can't help with ranking the scarcity...

cccc wrote:imo there are the super commons knight bescher lajoie young hartsel and then there are some that's equally tough but we only notice the big names like cobb/matty/wagner...like when's the last time u saw a horizontal seigle or a davis e105 cards like that? and by equally tough i don't mean a finite # for each but the difference can't be more than a handful.

Fair point, Quan. The HOFers are more memorable, and that probably influences our perceptions of scarcity. It's very likely that a number of unheralded commons belong on the "extremely scarce" tier. With a relatively small sample size, it's going to be a lot of guesswork anyway. But that's the fun part.

I've heard that there are only 1-2 Cobbs known to exist though...

If memory serves me correctly, there are 4 or 5 cards that never been seen even though that are in the checklist. This is info from my 1980s collecting days so they may have been seen since then

Jay

fisherboy7 wrote:
I've heard that there are only 1-2 Cobbs known to exist though...

I have heard that there are more than that.

I think that Wagner throwing is much scarcer than Wagner batting. Maybe 5 to 1

sweet card DK. as for the cobb bruce babcock and botn each have 1 and i might be forgetting another so they're out there.

cccc wrote:sweet card DK. as for the cobb bruce babcock and botn each have 1 and i might be forgetting another so they're out there.

Good 'ol Quan, can always be relied upon for the insider info.

The SGC Pop report shows Bescher, Young, Miller, Wagner, Knight, Lajoie and Hartsel seem to be significantly more common.