Owner Comments:
I feel like getting this this coin, despite it being one of the lower grades in the set for now, is one of the bigger wins for the set just because I had a much harder time finding 1986-dated examples that were in nice-looking uncirculated condition.
The 1982 is common as dirt in high grade and it is one of the few years that has a lot of high-grade NGC-graded examples I think because it was the first year of the history-making coin and so they were saved heavily.
The 1983, 1985 and 1987 can be acquired easily through buying inexpensive Franklin mint sets – an option I availed myself of happily, as I discuss on some of the other coins in this set.
I managed to get lucky early on with picking up lots of 500 Lire coins that contained nice 1984, and 1985 coins early on, and got lucky by finding some reasonably priced 1988 and 1989 dated examples early on in my search for these…
But, in all of this, the 1986 was one that was eluding me, and I was starting to worry that finding a good one was going to turn into a major problem for this set.
In truth, the 1986 is one of the most common years, having the 2nd highest mintage, behind only the 1987. And it has a high frequency of 28% per Numista, but I just was not finding any that still looked even remotely good or worth grading for this set.
I’d just about given up on it and accepted that this slot might be sitting empty for a while, and I was just going to focus on getting more 1983 and 1987 dated coins and trying to make the rest of the set as strong as I could.
The fact that this was our birthyear coin just made this so much more frustrating for me.
I went to my wife at one point along the way and asked her if she thought I should buy more of the Franklin mint sets hoping to target better ’83 and ’87 examples or buy more 12-coin lots from a seller I’d bought from previously and see what we got (they were mixed lots of random date XF, AU, and MS coins from the 1980s and early 1990s – no coins from the late 1990s and 2000s, which were their own challenge – and so it was a real gamble). She favored getting the lots of random mixed dates and conditions to see what we got.
It turns out one of the things we got was this coin. We got two 1986-dated examples in that group of 24 coins (I ordered two 12-coin lots together), but this was far and above the nicer of the two.
I was extremely happy to find this coin when going through that batch and very glad I’d gone with Shandy’s gut on it. I was also very happy to see this thing hit a gem-uncirc grade and not come back as another MS64 (or lower). Because it just has not been easy for me to find these.