I picked up some Gallery Mint restrikes last year and really enjoyed them so I sent them off to NGC on one of my tokens submissions along with a Thomas Cremona quarter restrike, and they all came back ineligible. Funny because they did a full ID of the pieces on the labels so they know what they are. Why can't they just grade them? Is this some politics between the TPGs and Gallery Mint? I just want my tokens slabbed. Did any of the TPGs start allowing GMM restrikes to be slabbed or do I need to make my own holders or what?
NGC and PCGS won’t slab a lot of items. I believe the standard they apply is it needs to be included in one of the major references that they use. Some items that are in Krause unusual world coins are listed included (that is how a few Dan Carr pieces got graded by PCGS). As far as your gallery mint tokens, ICG and Anacs are the two TPGs that would likely graded them.
Realize that it is an open market. If the grader doesn't get to see many examples then it can become a liability. And only because they are starting at ground level.
Ok so I get that for coins, but for tokens and medals, especially when they are low value? I love NGC since I mostly do world coins and I've consulted for NGC on world coins. So I'm firmly in the NGC camp, but I've been consistently disappointed with their tokens and medals service because they keep sending most of my stuff back as ineligible. Even sometimes when I've provided catalog numbers for references they list. Even when the value I listed for the token is negligible and I just want a condition rarity slabbed. I get them back always the same, completely identified correctly on the label, but marked as ineligible. What's the point? If they've done all the work up to that point, come on just grade it and slab it and take my money. I mean PCGS will generally do that, though they will also send back tokens and medals as ineligible, their bar is way way farther out for doing that than NGC's. I've had medals slabbed by PCGS that just say "Silver Medal" as the attribution. Ok, that attribution sucks compared to what NGC will do, but you know what? At least they graded it and slabbed it, which is what I paid them to do, and NGC won't. At this point, I've moved most of my tokens and medals submissions over to PCGS with the exception of a couple series I've been working on where NGC does slab them and most or all of my examples are already NGC slabbed. In this case, I was submitting some tokens I knew they would slab so I was hoping these could go along for the ride, but I guess that was too much to ask. Even with the above, the lion share of my tokens and medals are in trays. Since neither NGC nor PCGS are going to slab all of my material, I'd rather these collections be presented consistently raw than be inconsistently slabbed.
Yeah, that doesn't make sense to me either. If they have gone to that level, why not just give it a grade. I wish I had the answers Jaelus, I don't. I just don't have coins graded. Hopefully someone knows the ins and outs of PCGS and NGC.
