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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;red_spork, post: 4668243, member: 74282&quot;]When I look at rarity in terms of the Second Punic War era coins I collect one of the big factors I look at is who among the specialists of the series has or had an example. I know several of the specialists who collect these coins in any sort of comprehensive manner and I know their collections relatively well. If none of them have a given silver type for instance, I can be pretty sure it qualifies as &quot;extremely rare&quot;. Varieties(in the sense of slight stylistic variations, legend errors, etc) tend to be a little different. Sometimes no one cares about those, but for the most part all of these collectors care about collecting all or most of the individual types, and a coin is at best scarce if all have that individual type.</p><p><br /></p><p>Number on the market can be a good proxy as well but can be deceiving because of the sheer number of errors there are in attribution of these early series. A friend recently asked if the Crawford 78/1 &quot;staff&quot; denarius was really as rare as it appeared to be from the number of ACSearch. The answer was &quot;sort of&quot; because there are more misattributed examples on ACSearch under 89/2, 106/3, and a handful of other Crawford numbers, and won&#039;t come up under a search for the actual type. This type is at best scarce when one looks at its inclusion in major collections.</p><p><br /></p><p>Die numbers can be a good proxy as well, as less dies tend to mean higher rarity but occasionally that too can be deceiving. Some dies have a freakishly large number of survivors even though there&#039;s seemingly nothing weird going on. Some series are likewise rare on the market but struck from a number of dies and virtually all examples seem to have a new die on at least one side, if not both.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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