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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;cladking, post: 2013478, member: 68&quot;]A great deal depends on how you define grade as to which is scarcer, the &#039;82-P or &#039;83-P. I put a great deal of weight into die condition and strike and the grading services don&#039;t.&nbsp; They&#039;ve got lots of these graded MS-65 that I consider to be poor specimens because they were struck by worn tired dies and/ or strike pressure was too low to bring up all the detail.&nbsp; To my mind a coin that lacks detail might as well be worn and it&#039;s with full detail and attractive surfaces that most clad is hard to find in any grade.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>The &#039;82 and &#039;83 are as different as night and day in terms of typical grade.&nbsp; In &#039;83 the design was lowered and strengthened to facilitate high speed production so dies wore much more slowly creating far larger numbers of well made coins.&nbsp; But this was no panacea for the few collectors because the &#039;83&#039;s were banged up a lot more before leaving the mint.&nbsp; More &#039;83-P&#039;s were saved than &#039;82-P&#039;s and much larger numbers of nice AU&#039;s were recovered from circulation.&nbsp; The &#039;82-P is less likely to have nice smooth and attractive surfaces.&nbsp; The way the services grade and with current demand the &#039;83-P looks far scarcer in high grade but if you are looking for well-made coins it&#039;s the &#039;82-P that is tougher.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>Yes, world coins are even scarcer in Unc because most coin collectors in those days were in the US.&nbsp; There were far more people collecting Russian or Indian moderns in the US than even Russia or India.&nbsp; And US collectors hate base metal coins.&nbsp; Russian mint sets had mintages in the tens of thousands and most were sold here but these sets were so unpopular that dealers would break them up for their junk buckets. Indian proof sets had mintages in the hundreds but you couldn&#039;t give them away.&nbsp; These coins are relatively common because they were issued in sets but most world moderns had no interest at all so were never issued in sets. These coins can be excessively rare but still aren&#039;t collected so no one knows what they are.&nbsp; The Russian and Indian moderns have simply exploded in price the last several years with some having gains in the ten of thousands of percent.&nbsp; These still aren&#039;t a known quantity because they are only beginning to be collected.&nbsp; It will be years until their relative availability is known.&nbsp; In the meantime some are overpriced are some are dramatically underpriced.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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