Earlier today, I was able to cross off a significant milestone for my ancient coin collection, a denarius of Nerva. As of now, I only need a denarius of Trajan and Hadrian to complete a set of denarii depicting each of the Nerva-Antonine emperors. Although, I'll probably expand the purview of my set in the future to include Aelius and the various empresses. Regardless, this will probably be my last major purchase for the next few months. Nerva AR Denarius 97 A.D. Obverse: IMP NERVA CAES AVG P M TR P II COS III P P, laureate head right Reverse: CONCORDIA EXERCITVVM, clasped hands. Diameter: 17mm Weight: 3.20g
Really nice pickup, actually saw this one a couple days ago and struck me as a good deal. I bought a Domitian denarius from the same seller a couple months back and went really smooth. Congrats on the addition!
Congratulations on finding such a solid, and generally cool example, especially as your first foray into either Nerva or VCoins. ...If it was me, I'd be in no hurry to upgrade. Best of luck with the other ones!
Bradley, how was your experience with VCoins overall? I've thought about purchasing from them in the past, but never went through with it.
So far, I'd say that my experience with VCoins has been quite good @QuintupleSovereign. My order and payment have already been processed despite purchasing it only hours ago. Although, you'd probably be better off asking other members who regularly post on the ancients forum. https://www.vcoins.com/en/CodeOfEthics.aspx
Great question, I spent my first three years of collecting at my LCS and surrounding coin stores cause I was apprehensive to buying online. However, as I wanted to get into rarer coins and have ALOT more selection I decided to try out vcoins around May of this year. Since then I’ve made around 10 purchases from the site and have never had any problems and have got some great deals. I can highly recommend it as a reliable, easy place to buy. I don’t if maybe some others have had different experiences but I would reckon most members here would agree.
I've certainly bought at least half the coins I've acquired over the last couple of years through VCoins. Since VCoins is comprised of so many different dealers, it's difficult to generalize. But I will say that any problems I've had have been with postal delays that aren't the dealers' fault. Especially this year. I've never had to make a complaint to VCoins itself, so I can't speak to how well that works, or to how readily they enforce the VCoins guarantee of authenticity, etc. Obviously some dealers' prices are higher than others, perhaps justifiably given the quality of their offerings and perhaps not. But it's easy to have your search results listed in price order (either up or down) instead of the standard ordering by the most recent offerings, so you can compare the coins from different dealers and make your own decisions. The two biggest advantages that VCoins has for a US collector over its main competitor, MA-Shops, are (1) a far higher percentage of the VCoins dealers are located in the USA as opposed to Europe, something especially important during the pandemic (at MA-Shops, the only major US dealer I can think of is Harlan J. Berk, Ltd.); and (2) the much larger collective inventory of ancient coins. I will often search for a particular type at both venues, and almost invariably there are far more choices at VCoins -- sometimes by a ratio of as much as 5 or even 10 to 1. Also, I get the impression that Germany has by far the the largest number of dealers on MA-Shops, whereas the UK seems to have more dealers than any country other than the USA on VCoins. Coins seem to arrive quite quickly from the UK, even this year, whereas coins take forever from Germany. (Earlier this year, I was told by one German dealer that they weren't allowed to send packages from Germany to the USA. Only letters.)
