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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;ambr0zie, post: 5365781, member: 80952&quot;]I stopped searching for them in gem condition because it seems harder than Carol I&#039;s coinage. I am happy with them in VF-XF.</p><p>There are 4 communist coins missing from my collection, but all of them are &quot;phantom coins&quot;.</p><p>The 1 leu and 2 lei 52 coins are extremely rare. But the story with them is that they were in circulation for a few days and only in some areas, then the government implemented a monetary reform (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_leu#Third_leu_(ROL):_1952%E2%80%932005" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_leu#Third_leu_(ROL):_1952%E2%80%932005" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_leu#Third_leu_(ROL):_1952–2005</a>)&nbsp; and decided all of them need to be melted.</p><p>The ones available today (and I don&#039;t mean the replicas; they are easily spotted but I saw people being tricked) are the ones saved from melting (I heard older collectors said the workers simply stole some before the melting process, filled their pockets and used them as poker chips) or the ones simply stored by collectors.</p><p><br /></p><p>3 bani 1954, listed in catalogues as having a mintage of 33.400.000, is in fact very hard to find. That was just the projected mintage, in reality they are MUCH rarer than 3 bani 1952 and 1953. Price for a poorly conserved 3 bani &#039;54 (VG-F) is about 200 EUR and I simply think it&#039;s too much to add it.</p><p><br /></p><p>Another &quot;phantom&quot; coin is 5 bani 1958. Some consider it a pattern, but I discussed with older collectors who assured me it was a standard circulation coin, but with a very low mintage - nobody knows why. In the 70s and 80s you could find them, but in 8 years of active collecting I saw 2 examples, both quite pricy (500 EUR was the cheapest, a VF).[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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