Post or Describe Your Wish List Coin

I was considering starting a thread like this. But I found out that he already existed.
So this thread revives after more than three years.

Personally, this would be my ultimate dream coin. I would give my entire collection for it. And if I had to, I would even give up collecting for good.



Domitian 81-96
AV Aureus
Struck 88
DOMITIANVS – AVGVSTVS Laureate head right
GERMANICVS / COS XIIII Emperor in triumphal quadriga l., holding laurel-branch in right hand and scepter in left hand
Ric 561

I don't think that's it is a realistic wish coin because it was sold for 26.000 CHF

 

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Sounds a lot more realistic than an Eid Mar, at least!

 

I Dont know what it is.....but this Mithradates VI is the next one im aiming for. I find these, well, stunning!

 

This is a question we all must face. Is our ultimate dream coin worth destroying our hobby to obtain? After collecting perhaps a thousand coins, would you trade it all for one? I would not. There is a sale currently that has two coins high on my list but neither is worth to me even the current bid. Perhaps I am just not the want list sort of person. Nice coins, like nice kindergartners, need to play well with others rather than hogging all the attention.

 

That is a very justified point. That I wrote it was a bit of an exaggeration. I mainly wanted to indicate how much I would like this. I personally think that calling this now was easy for me because this mint is far beyond my reach. You can indeed wonder if you really have more fun with one example of such an incredibly valuable coin. After all, part of the fun of collecting is searching and researching new coins.

 

Hoping to eventually add a nice Commodus to my collection. I've seen one or two already but they were not the quality that I wanted.



EGYPT, Alexandria. Commodus. AD 177-192. BI Tetradrachm (25.1mm, 12.04 g, 12h). Dated RY 27 of Marcus Aurelius (AD 186/187). Laureate head right / Head of Zeus-Ammon right, wearing solar disk and horn; L K Z (date) across field. Köln 2225; Dattari (Savio) 3900; K&G 41.84; Emmett 2568.27. VF. Fully silvered, rare as such.

 

Thank you for resurrecting this thread @Parthicus Maximus ! It really takes me back to the time when I was just starting to collect Judaean coins. In the three years that I’ve been collecting, I’ve not only acquired my wish list coin but three more in the series of coins under Herod Antipas.


Original Post:





Wish list acquisitions:

 

I agree with this sentiment although I have a slightly different view: if there is an irreplaceable coin available and it would require a finite-sized group of replaceable coins to be sold, that might be a worthwhile trade. This presupposes that all aspects of the currently held coins are indeed replaceable within a reasonable timeframe (maybe a year or two).

It essentially just becomes a "loan" of the currently held coins: you'll get them back in the future but for now, the irreplaceable coin is worth buying first.

 

I am a tad late to these great thread. Most of my dream coins are from NFA auctions.
they had some doozies.

There is an old saying, "Beggars can't be choosy" Thats my predicament in life, there are thousands of dreamy coins that I can never have in my collection. However, if I won the lottery, my top pick would be that mintstate (NFA) auction Alexander of Carthage Aureus. That coin caught my eye, even back in 1990. It sold for $220K.

I even have dreams of finding treasure, but in the real world, I have come up empty Maybe, I will buy my first lottery ticket this week....
John

 

I agree with AJ on this from his position because coins on his irreplaceable list are likely to be very expensive. My collection is different. Over half of my most favored and hard to replace coin cost me under $250 and at least one was as little as $5. When a coin is not known in high grade but still exists as the only or best known it will be harder to replace than a coin that costs $10,000. Very expensive coins tend to make the rounds as the owners decide they have had the honor of owning it but want the money for other conquests. Coins that are unique or very rare but that have no demand in the high dollar circuit will be harder to replace because the big auctions would rarely descend to list something like that. I know AJ has some coins that are irreplaceable at any price but he has more that could be replaced or improved with an unlimited budget (we are talking guys that make Clio look poor).

The coin to which you refer was sold by NFA in 1989 (June 1, XXII lot 126). I do not have the complete list so I can not say whether or not this coin was on that list but several coins in that sale were later shown to be fakes including the one they put on the cover. I really value the coins I got from NFA (junkers by their standards) and still enjoy looking at their catalogs BUT NFA was stronger at business than they were at coins in some respects and we all make mistakes. Some of the mistakes sent Bruce McNall to jail and ruined one of my favorite sources of coins (their junkers were my gems). Not knowing the details of this particular coin, I might suggest not paying the big bucks for a coin from NFA XXII without consulting not only an expert but someone involved with the 'outing' of those particular fakes who knows what is going on and what happened to those fakes in the intervening years.
https://www.vcoins.com/en/stores/an...reek_and_roman_coins_fakes/39069/Default.aspx


Judging from the weight match, this suggests your dream coin is a nightmare.
http://www.forumancientcoins.com/fakes/displayimage.php?pos=-8029

 

I am glad you did not bid against me in Triton XX where I got the one below as part of a lot of a couple dozen tets. Mine may not be what you want condition-wize. I doubt you will fing one with full silvering because I do not believe these were silvered. The ones I have seen have been billon that appears toned brown or bright silver depending on the way the were cleaned and when. I can not prove when Alexandria actually started adding silver. I would love to hear experts on these chime in here but added silver is different than polished billon.

 

Absolutely. And, to me, there's also a point at which a smidgen of incremental quality isn't worth the astronomic increase in price. Some people will happily pay this (especially in US coins) but I honestly can't tell the difference between MS67 and MS68.

I'll be posting some of my NYINC purchases soon where it's evident that I bit the bullet and opted to buy a coin to "cross off the list" rather than wait - potentially for a very long time - for an example that would be in better condition but also at a price I'd be willing to pay. There are some cases where it makes sense to pay up in my mind but many times I'm happy with a nice example and can then afford another coin or two "for free".

 

That's an interesting thought.

The year or 2 time frame puts quite a few constraints on what would be considered "replaceable" and what would be considered "irreplaceable." If a coin does not come to market in a suitable quality in 2 years, that would seem to put it closer to the "irreplaceable" category than the "replaceable" category. I have multiple coins in my collection that I easily spent 2 years hunting for. Likewise, once in your collection, a coin becomes effectively irreplaceable under this definition if it would cost more than ~2 years worth of coin budget to replace. I don't have any of these, since I tend to buy at least every few months.

I totally agree. I mostly don't mess with modern MS68/69/70 stuff mostly for this reason. The only coins I'd ever really be inclined to purchase in these grades would be 1950-1970 cameo proofs, or ASEs.

I tend to wait and resist the temptation to cross things off a list. Modern collectors refer to this as "hole filling," after the holes in their albums needing to be filled with coins. I have so many interests, ancient and otherwise, that I can afford to wait for specimens that excite me, rather than filling any particular space in my collection. (For example, I'm collecting US type coins 1800-present, US commemorative silver coins by type 1892-1954, rainbow toned Liberty nickels, denarii of Antoninus Pius, Civil War tokens from my home state, numismatic items from my home town, etc. etc.) If that perfect A-P denarius is hiding from me, I have an outlet in the form of my type set, or my commems, or whatever. In fact, commems partially led me to collecting ancients, because so many ancient coins actually are commemoratives of a sort.

 

Athens New Style: King Mithradates and Aristion, Star between 2 Crescents. The Final New Style I need but totally out of my reach so my last purchase Griffin is the end of my purchases.
Even more out of my reach is this variation of a Star between 2 Crescents a unique coin where the Pontic badge is replaced with a Headdress of Isis : of which I have proposed a theory similar to Ashton's on the large siege bronzes of Rhodes but extended.

 

My Mithridates's.( DBDc80's post above) This is the common pegasos reverse dated 89/88 BC. DeCallatay calls this type realistic portraiture, whilst the Stag reverse is more allusional to Alexander.

 

Mithradates as Herakles from Odessos. 3rd Mithridatic war and one of the last "Alexander's".

 

My dream coin of the year is something cool in my area of interest (city coins of judaea and decapolis) and I don't have a picture because I want it to be unpublished! So will just keep my eyes open!

 

I can't remember if I had listed this somewhere else.. anyway, here it is. My wish list consists of one coin.. the 1877 Indian Head Cent. I got snookered two times when I thought I was buying it. It was not the fault of the seller on ether case. It is the responsibility of the buyer to read the listing to make sure you know what is actually being sold. My first time, I ended up buying 4 stamps with a picture of the coin. I liked the stamp so much, I'm glad I did get it. My next purchase ended up being a 3" replica of the coin. It, too, was nice, so I ended up keeping it. Since then I did more research and found a 1877 IHC in Good condition would cost several hundreds of dollars. If I spent that much on a coin, my wife would kill me. She has to catch me though. I am a CPA and handle the books for our family. My wife is a retired High School Senior English teacher and can write a check and use her VISA. I just have to tell her that she is over budget. She is a beautiful doll, so I just look the other way.

 

One of my dream coins is this drachm of Antinous. It's currently priced at almost $10,000...so far I have restricted myself to coins $2,000 or less. However, I am not sure it has not been tooled. So far I have contented myself with a lead tessera...