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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;sand, post: 8109002, member: 118540&quot;]This is an interesting topic to me. A topic which gets close to the heart of why people collect ancients, in my opinion.</p><p>I have bought several ancient coins, which were in NGC Ancients slabs. I broke all of the coins out of the slabs. I like to touch the coins. I like to look at the edges of the coins. I like to be able to put lots of coins in a single tray, so I can view them all at the same time.</p><p>However, NGC Ancients slabs have value to me, for authentication, attribution, and identifying things like tooling and smoothing.</p><p>I disregard the grade information (overall grade, strike grade, and surface grade) on the NGC Ancients slab.</p><p>The ancients experts at NGC Ancients seem to be very expert at authenticating ancient coins. Therefore, I highly value their opinions about the authenticity of ancient coins, as well as their opinions about tooling, smoothing, etc.</p><p>I don&#039;t know anything, about the expertise of other ancient coin slab companies (ANACS, etc).</p><p>For the rest of my post, when I say &quot;slab&quot;, I mean &quot;NGC Ancients slab&quot;.</p><p>However, I wish that NGC Ancients also sold certificates of authenticity (COAs), in which each COA had photos of the coin, as well as a lookup number, so that anyone could lookup high resolution photos of the coin on the NGC Ancients web site. For me, that would be better, than a slab.</p><p>I know that NGC Ancients issues COAs for coins that cannot be slabbed (if the coins are too large, or too irregular in shape, etc). But I wish NGC Ancients offered COAs for all ancient coins.</p><p>Each ancient coin looks different, because of the style, the flan, the strike, and the wear. Therefore, a COA would be better than a slab, for me, because I could lookup the photos of the coin on the NGC web site, to verify the authenticity of the coin. And if someone altered the coin, then I think it would be obvious, by comparing the coin, versus the photos on the NGC web site.</p><p>Before I break an ancient coin out of a slab, I take photos of both sides of the slab, so that I have the lookup number.</p><p>I have only been collecting ancients for 3 years. And I&#039;m sort of a generalist. I collect many areas of ancients. Therefore, I&#039;m sort of a jack of all trades, master of none, when it comes to ancients.</p><p>Therefore, usually, I don&#039;t trust myself, to be able to authenticate an ancient coin, from seller photos alone. I think I can weed out bad fakes. But I don&#039;t think I can weed out good fakes.</p><p>If the coin is inexpensive, then I don&#039;t mind taking a chance on a coin, based on seller photos alone, even on Ebay or Heritage Auctions.</p><p>But if the coin is expensive, then I prefer to do one of the following :</p><p>1. Buy from a seller who has a good reputation as an expert in authenticating ancient coins.</p><p>2. Buy a coin, which has a provenance, in which I can find photos of the coin on sites such as ACsearch, which has a record that the coin was sold by a seller who has a good reputation as an expert in authenticating ancient coins.</p><p>3. Buy a coin in an NGC Ancients slab.</p><p>For example, I would buy an expensive coin from Heritage Auctions, but only if the coin were in a slab.</p><p>However, CNG Auctions has a good reputation as a seller who is expert in authenticating ancient coins, therefore I would buy an expensive unslabbed ancient coin from CNG.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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