Just a reminder - don't let toning distract you from surface details. Some of these coins literally sat in wet burlap sacks for 60 years at the bottom of a vault, untouched & unloved. This is one of those with a Poe-esque story written all over it, and luster still peeking through the darkness! The reverse is also true - don't let a blast white surface distract from wear and tear (or, even worse, rainbow toning).
Marked "Best Answer". I'd have been hard pressed to guess the slabbers saw an MS65 coin here from pics alone.
No, presenting a coin in its best possible manner is most productive. If you stay around here, we’ve all eaten crow happily. Just some advice from a very experienced Morgan collector. Bad pictures make a coin look bad. Moreover, there are different kinds of toning. That coin does not have marketably desirable toning. Cheers!
Certainly not trying to pick a fight, but the difference between "high AU" & MS65 is not due to any of my (many) photographic failings. We've all misjudged a coin before in a quick glance. This one had me look from the coin to the label and back again before I recognized I was falling into the toning discounting trap. I could even go a step further and question if there's a bit of unconscious bias creeping into how we view coins in this hobby largely dominated by older white guys (I'm rapidly aging into that camp myself). Heck - why do some collectors refer to a clean *silver* field as "blast white"? I shared the coin here in the hopes that others might see the same thing I do & look deeper at some of these storied pieces.
Not the toining it just seems to be a weaker strike and mushy detail,looks different than my MS morgans.
I've seen a few of these before (darker photo and darkish/crusty toning) that have been 64s or 65s so I went 65 here as well. I'm not the biggest fan of these (in terms of adding to my collection), but I do think the grade is fair (and might have actually been higher if it was blast white).