American Beauty 350 with frame is the most straight-forward of all the AB subsets. The checklist consists of 190 different poses. As a result, it is easier to list the “no-prints” here than the full checklist. 184 of the cards in the AB350w/f checklist come from Print Group 2. Print group 2 consists of 202 cards. This leaves these 18 poses that were not printed with an AB350w/f back:
It’s not readily apparent why most of these players were excluded from the AB350w/f print run. Demmitt STL and O’Hara STL are the two that make sense, because we know the team name changes were made near the end of 350 series production, and they were only printed with Polar Bear backs.
That covers 184 of the 190 cards in the subset. The other 6 are the “Super Prints”, also known as Print Group 5. The Super Prints are an interesting subset that have their own rules. They were printed with more backs than any other poses in the entire set. I will most likely devote an entire post to them at some point. As you can see, all 6 were very popular players at the time:
As I said in Part One of this series, there are more T206s with AB350w/f backs in existence than AB350nf backs. The reason is that AB350w/f were printed on 190 different poses while AB350nf backs were printed on only 37 poses. So, if you just want one copy of each back and you don’t care who is on the front, you’ll have an easier time finding the AB350w/f. You’ll also most likely pay less.
One thing that many collectors do not realize is that individual poses with AB350w/f backs are usually more scarce than their AB350nf counterparts. I think the best way to illustrate this is with an example. There are 8 players who have one pose that was printed with AB350w/f back and another with AB350nf back. If you were working on player back runs for any of these players, you would most likely find the AB350w/f back tougher to locate. 4 of those players also were printed with AB460 backs. I will exclude them from the example because their Pop Reports are harder to read. PSA only recently started to differentiate between AB350nf and AB460 backs, so our Pop Report Results would be suspect if I were to include those 4 players. Here is the list of the remaining 4 players, along with PSA and SGC pop report numbers for each front/back combo*.
This example serves as a fairly random sampling of cards from each subset. As you can see, each card on the AB350w/f list is more scarce than the AB350nf pose. To get a better idea of the Pop Reports for cards with each back, play around a little bit with the PSA and SGC Pop Reports.
Some poses are very tough to find with AB350w/f and command a premium over the more common subjects. Thielman (2 combined in PSA & SGC Pop Reports) and Herbie Moran (3 combined in PSA & SGC Pop Reports) are a couple examples. There are also some subjects that are pretty easy to find. The best tool we have to help us judge scarcity is the Pop Reports, so I recommend using them to help you make a buying or selling decision.
*-For each of these players, the SGC Pop Report also lists a generic “American Beauty” back. Since these cards could be either pose, I simply excluded them from the results.
Thank you to T206resource.com for allowing me to use their checklists.