I want to get more into ancient coins. I just don’t know much about them or know exactly what I want to collect so it doesn’t make much sense for my to buy better coins. I do enjoy roll searching and researching/identifying world coins from bulk lots so I’m thinking uncleaned coins would give me the chance to learn more about the coins and identify them. But at the same time I’ve heard a lot of them are blanks or no no longer identifiable once cleaned? So is that a good way for me to go? I don’t mine ending up with common, low grade and duplicates if I can end up with identifiable coins. Also considering I don’t know what I’m doing yet if I go the uncleaned route what should I look for? And how much should I expect to pay per coin? How likely am I to ruin the coins at first? And if its likely should I start with the cheapest ones I can find? Or is this a bad idea?
Uncleaned coins are fine if you get quality coins--junk in...junk out, though. Many (or even most) of the "uncleaned coins" you get on eBay have been gone through and sorted many times by various people, until there is nothing left but junkers. You are not even going to be able to ID some of these "uncleaned coins" except for maybe reverse type or Emperor; but not mint. So, unless you have a source in Europe or the Mid-East, you would be better of just buying cheap bronzes. On Vcoins there are many single uncleaned coins selling for $10-15; which would be easy enough to attribute. https://www.vcoins.com/en/Search.as...alse&Unassigned=False&searchOrderBy=price_asc
