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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;cladking, post: 132422, member: 68&quot;]There is a lot of variability in quality from mint to mint, year to year and between the different denominations.&nbsp; 1966 quarters were typically very poorly struck from poorly made and heavily worn dies but it wasn&#039;t overly difficult to find these pretty clean.&nbsp; 1974 dollars often looked to be VF right out of the bag.&nbsp; 1998 cents were often pristine gems and MS-65 was nearly typical.&nbsp; In more recent times there has been a great increase in strike quality because of improved die steels and lower relief but these are often scratched up very badly.&nbsp; The Delaware Philly quarter was one of those that was almost impossible to find clean.&nbsp; I never did see one that would grade over MS-61 and I did watch pretty closely.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>Another thing to consider is that a roll or even a jumbo bag is in no way a representative sample of a coin.&nbsp; The output of only a few presses will fill these rolls and bags so you&#039;ll see just a few minute cross section of what was being produced by only a few dies.&nbsp; A typical roll will usually contain five to ten die pairs and each die pair will be over a short period of their production.&nbsp; Even in years that quality is horrendous it&#039;s possible to get a roll of all gems (merely unlikely).&nbsp; It is this tendency for gems and varieties to &quot;bunch up&quot; that makes them so difficult to find but when you do find them there may be thousands in the area.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>There was almost no interest in circulating coinage until the last few years.&nbsp; As proof consider the &#039;82-P quarter.&nbsp; Everyone knew that there would be no mint sets made that year so more rolls of these were set aside than any of the other eagle reverse clad quarters.&nbsp; Despite this heavy saving this roll still sells for a couple hundred dollars since there are no mint sets to cannibilize for the coin.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>While the bicentennial quarter was horded in large numbers and the average quality was good, the gems are nearly as scarce for this coin as the others of the era.&nbsp; This gives some insight into how difficult gems of some of these are.&nbsp; Little has really changed in recent years except that now it&#039;s largely marking keeping coins out of gem status rather than strike and marking.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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