...well, sort of: Silver Ike $1 Planchets Experimental Rinse with Mint Notes Discovery Group NGC They slabbed one of these with Sharpie marks all over it! Not even an acetone rinse first! Not my collecting niche (fortunately, given the price), but this seemed like an interesting outlier...
Well yes, those marks are the provenance - they demonstrate which particular test the mint was performing...
Well, it is a set of three. I have no idea what such things go for. When in doubt, why not list at a sky-high price and entertain offers?
They (the mint) did the same kind of thing with Peace dollar trial strikes, TPG slabbed them too. And $20,000 was even close to what those sold for. And they don't "slip out of the mint". Usually things like that are saved by the Mint Director, or some other higher up, and become part of their personal collections. Then years later they are sold.
I could see them being valuable IF you also have copies of mint documents that mention them and describe them well enough to be assured that the planchet in question is the same as the one in the documents. Otherwise it's just a planchet that some one wrote on. Documentation is important in cases like this.
Unh huh, and they are the mighty TPG, and they are always, always, right - about everything. Everybody knows that
