The Washington-Carver Silver Commemorative Subset (1951-1954) that is. Because of the numbers minted (in all 1,332,392) and because the series ran over a few years (1951-54 P/D/S (12 coins in all)), I was mislead by my brain to think I could complete it without much difficulty. After all, they're all over the place, right? The thing is some of them have mintages as low as 8,003! Try buying/finding a Morgan with that kind of production number. At first I was going to go MS66 across the board, then realized a) I'm not in love with the coin, b) some of the lower mintage coins take a HUGE price jump from 65 to 66, c) I didn't want to spend years on doing this, and d) 66 money on some could be better spent on other coins. So I tried for 65 or up. I did end up with a couple of 64's because they were in a PDS set 66 at a nice price (basically the 64's were free). I probably will upgrade those 64's at some point. I'm also working on a Booker T Washington Subset, and that's proving to be just as challenging, if not more so (I have 6 left on those). At any rate, these last two were a bit tough to find at reasonable prices, and to some degree I 'settled' just to complete the subset, but at least I stayed at the 65 level. If you read this much, these were the last two, and if you'd like to see the whole set, it's here: in my NGC Washington-Carver Thematic Registry Set (Ranked #14)
Congrats on the set!! I do like those coins, I had no idea they could be such a tough set to complete though. Thanks for the heads up.
Great work! I have never tried doing the full set and just like you would have assumed it to be simple enough to complete. When looking at Commems, one does see these and Bookers often, but with a few of those low mintages, it makes sense that some may not be easy to find.
