Why Are T206 Baseball Tobacco Cards So Popular?

T206 Baseball Cards | The Most Collected Vintage Baseball Card Set

When I speak to the many different collectors I encounter, when going out and trying to add to my own personal baseball card and memorabilia collection, the one topic that seems to come up fairly often is the T206 tobacco cards.

For the inexperienced or less knowledgeable collector, and please don’t take that as an insult if it applies to you – we all started somewhere, you may have seen a few of these cards around and didn’t think much of them.

The T206 tobacco card sets, when found anyway, are generally in only decent but sometimes poor condition due to their age and may not appear to hold much value if you are unfamiliar with the players on them or what makes them so special. To put this all into perspective for you allow me to give you a bit of a history lesson.

Between 1909 and 1911 the American Tobacco company used to print certain players’ images on baseball cards and would package them with their 16 different cigarette brands.

Baseball and tobacco were probably two of the most popular American past-times during this time period. The T206 set consists of 523 cards, they measure at 1-7/16” x 2-5/8” and this size is considered to be the standard tobacco card size.

This is considered a landmark set by collectors everywhere because of the players in this set (Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Walter Johnson, Cy Young, and Christy Mathewson to name a few), the size of the cards, the rarity of the cards themselves, and of course the overall quality of its color lithographs.

Collecting any of the cards from the T206 set can be one of the more time consuming, but also rewarding experiences a sports card and memorabilia collector will experience.

It is because of how challenging collecting any number of these cards in this set is that sparks and drives the interest and overall passion in us collectors getting our hands on whichever of these cards that we can.