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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;AncientJoe, post: 8005538, member: 44357&quot;]Ancients are a great era to collect because absolutely no one - not even the British Museum - could ever hope to build a &quot;complete&quot; collection.</p><p><br /></p><p>Therefore, many of us choose to either be a generalist or a specialist in a particular sub-section.</p><p><br /></p><p>I started in US coinage and was never interested in date sets - I much prefer typesets, and even above that, a &quot;design typeset&quot;, where a design is represented by one example (i.e. any denomination from the Barber coinage; no need for a half dollar/quarter/dime which all look nearly identical).</p><p><br /></p><p>The US major typeset is 137 coins: in ancients, it would be many, many thousands. The US &quot;design typeset&quot; is smaller but still many thousands for ancients.</p><p><br /></p><p>All this to say, you can collect anything you like: you&#039;ll never be finished.</p><p><br /></p><p>Personally, I&#039;m taking a very minimalist approach, collecting coins which are artistic and historic and trying to tell the story of a millennium of history in as few coins as possible (&lt; 200 in total). This makes for some careful strategizing for what should/shouldn&#039;t be included, which also acts as a helpful and semi-artificial constraint to avoid overspending.</p><p><br /></p><p>So, while you may eventually specialize into the coinage of a particular city or emperor, it&#039;s also possible that you might <i>specialize </i>into being a <i>generalist </i>by further evolving/refining your tastes as you buy and see more and more coins. </p><p><br /></p><p>It then moves from being arbitrary into deliberate: the reasons <i>why </i>you chose a particular coin end up being the specialization.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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