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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;messydesk, post: 2172651, member: 1765&quot;]Rarity ratings for Morgan and Peace dollar VAMs work a little differently than do those for earlier series.&nbsp; Short story is that they&#039;re actually rather irrelevant.&nbsp; If you don&#039;t want the longer explanation, you can stop here.</p><p><br /></p><p>So you want the longer explanation.&nbsp; While for bust halves or big copper, the R-numbers are roughly a power of 3 scale, the R-numbers in VAM are on a power of 10 scale, where R-1 means tens of millions known (only seen for 1921) and R-8 means unique or nearly so.&nbsp; When the VAM book was first put together in 1971, these numbers were estimates based on searches through treasury bags.&nbsp; The numbers were never refined based on collector observations.&nbsp; Over the next 25 years, there would be a discovery of a new variety here or there, and its rarity was once again estimated based on current observations.&nbsp; Post-1996 (Top 100 book release), there started to be a boom in VAM collecting again.&nbsp; First the major varieties, such as those listed in the Top 100 book were the focus, but eventually more people got more interested in more varieties.&nbsp; As a result of looking at more coins more closely, more entries were made into the VAM catalog.&nbsp; The trend was not simply to have lots of catch-all varieties like &quot;normal dies&quot; and &quot;far date&quot; that would refer to several die pairs, but to study and catalog every die pair for a given date and mint.&nbsp; Several people have done this or are doing it for 78, 78-CC, 79-S, 81-O, 83, 83-O, 87, 95-S, 99, 02-O, 04-O, and others I&#039;ve probably missed (not sure why some of these dates were chosen).&nbsp; Far more money has been spent on most of these than will ever be made, but that is the nature of a labor of love.&nbsp; Anyway, back to rarity.&nbsp; The typical die pair made roughly 100,000 coins.&nbsp; If you start cataloging every die pair, you&#039;re not going to have R-1 or R-2 anymore, and R-3 depends on there being no attrition after the coins were minted.&nbsp; As a result, new discoveries are usually called R-5, meaning the number extant is estimated to be in the thousands.&nbsp; If a new discovery is a rather late die stage or something that makes Leroy Van Allen say, &quot;I can&#039;t believe I haven&#039;t seen this before,&quot; he assigns a higher number.&nbsp; The thing is, the old R-numbers haven&#039;t been changed, and it would probably be difficult to do so as well as hard to tell which have been refined and which haven&#039;t unless a different rarity scale (URS) were adopted for the revised estimates.</p><p><br /></p><p>So how does the VAM community deal with this?&nbsp; By ignoring the R-numbers and paying attention to population reports, collector reports of how easy or hard something is to find, and the census in the SSDC registry.&nbsp; Even then, however, a die pair for which only one or two specimens is known, such as an obscure 1921 &quot;scribble scratch&quot; variety, isn&#039;t going to generate collector interest beyond the handful of people pursuing those varieties, so there will be little or no premium on the coin.&nbsp; Meanwhile, an 1878 7TF that is not rare, but not one of the most common varieties will bring a modest premium, and a pop-top 1899-O VAM 32 Micro O in MS64 will bring 5 figures.&nbsp; Demand for specific varieties is not uniform across the Morgan dollar series, since I only know of one person trying to put together a collection of all 4418 varieties.&nbsp; Many Bust Half Nuts are working on a complete set of those, however.&nbsp; Likewise for EAC collectors.</p><p><br /></p><p>Bottom line, I guess, is that the rarity number, even if accurately known, doesn&#039;t necessarily identify how strong the market will be for a given coin.&nbsp; Collect what you like, learn about what you collect, and if you&#039;re not having fun, you&#039;re doing it wrong.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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