T207 Repint Complete Set

By Dean Hanley
Owner of Deanscards.com

The T207 set, commonly known as the brown background set, was originally manufactured by the tobacco industry giant, the American Tobacco Company, in 1912. The T207 baseball cards measure 1½” by 2-5/8”. Shortly after this set was printed, the American Tobacco Company would be dissolved due to the Sherman anti-trust legislation that broke the monopoly on tobacco.

The T207 baseball card set is a true hobby classic. The 200-card T207 set contains 13 players that are in Baseball’s Hall-of-Fame, including Walter Johnson, Tris Speaker, Frank Chance, John McGraw, Smokey Joe Wood and Joe Tinker. Two interesting T207 cards are Eddie Cicotte and Buck Weaver, who were members of the 1919 White Sox and banned from the game for life.


 This set is unique to Dean’s cards. We created it ourselves. It took a total of two years to get the entire process done. This is the only official T207 Reprint Set out there. To do so, we created a new company called Dean’s Reprints and began securing the needed images.

 This is one of the most famous pre-war sets and it was never issued or offered in the form of a reprint set. Reprint Sets give collectors the opportunity to enjoy cards that they might not be able to collect in the original form.

 DeansCards.com sells quite a few reprint singles and complete sets every year. For that reason, I decided we should recreate and issue a T207 reprint set. Due to the quality of the century old cards, almost all of the T207 images needed to be retouched. Great care was given making sure that the reprint cards remained true to the original set.


The original T207 set includes eight possible backs containing the name of tobacco brands in which the original cards were enclosed. We included a variety of these backs in the reprint set including three cards containing the ultra-scarce “Red Cross” backs. We were careful to use those backs on
cards, whose originals have been discovered with a Red Cross back.

One of the most interesting features of the T207 baseball card set are the player biographies on the back of the cards. Each of these bios needed to be retyped. We were careful to stay true to the original fonts and leave the original century old misspelled words. We also made sure to give it an assigned number to help collectors keep track. To ensure it is indeed a REPRINT, we added REPRINT to the back of the cards. I hope that the hobby purists will forgive us for these minor changes.

To view/purchase the original cards please click here.

 Dean Hanley, founder and owner of DeansCards.com, is considered one of the foremost experts on the subject of vintage baseball cards, other sports and non-sports cards and has a regular column in the Sports Collectors Digest and publishes articles on his blog.

Dean has also written two books on vintage sports cards: The Bubble Gum Card War: The Great Bowman & Topps Sets from 1948 to 1955 and Before There Was Bubble Gum: Our Favorite Pre-World War I Baseball Cards. Both are available in eBook and paperback form.

T-206 Honus Wagner Auction Article Features Dean Hanley

Dean and Dean's Cards were featured prominently in an article about the auction of a rare 1909 T-206 Honus Wagner card in excellent condition. The article appeared on February 26, 2013 in "Sports on Earth," a website that is part of MLB.com and USA Today. You can read the T-206 Honus Wagner article here.

Online article about T-206 Honus Wagner auction features Dean.

The Wagner card up for auction now is the Jumbo Wagner, named for its margins, which are wider than those found on the typical T-206 Wagner (printing and cutting standards were not as uniform then as they would later become). The wide margins protected the face of the card, keeping it in excellent condition. The card was graded as a "5" on a 1-to-10 condition scale by Professional Sports Authenticators, the independent company that provides industry-standard grades for collectibles.

The widely known Gretzky T-206 is an "8," the highest quality Wagner card in existence, though with a caveat: it was cut from a sheet and never inserted in a tobacco pack, allowing its corners to remain extra sharp. There is only one other T-206 Wagner "5" in the world, and only one "4." The Jumbo Wagner is a rarity among rarities.

Dean's Cards has a wide variety of authentic T-206 available on its website.

You can purchase the T-206 reprint set at Dean's Cards.com

You'll also find a beautiful 1909-11 T-206 Reprints Complete Set, known as "The Monster" on this page. Buying an authentic complete set of T-206 cards would cost millions, so this T-206 reprint set is an affordable option for collectors.

T-207 reprint set available at DeansCards.com.

Dean's Cards also offers another exclusive reprint set -- the 1912 T-207 reprint set, which we produced and reprinted in 2012 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the set. The T207 baseball card set is a true hobby classic. The 200-card T207 set contains 13 players that are in Baseball’s Hall-of-Fame, including Walter Johnson, Tris Speaker, Frank Chance, John McGraw, Smokey Joe Wood and Joe Tinker. Two interesting T207 cards are Eddie Cicotte and Buck Weaver, who were members of the 1919 White Sox and banned from the game for life.

The T207 reprint set turned out to be quite an undertaking, and took us two years to complete!

And if you're interested in adding the original T-206 Honus Wagner card to your collection, you can place your bid here. But have your wallet ready -- bidding begins at $500,000!