Back in Black. Not AC/DC, but Darth Vader, his dimensional coin returning in coloured form

Dropping last August as an offshoot of the New Zealand Mint’s high-relief range of Star Wars coins, Darth Vaders ultra-iconic helmet was an instant hit which went on to spawn similar Boba Fett and Stormtrooper releases. These are dimensional coins, those employing ultra high relief and a shaped form.

We covered this one, and the others, in prior articles, so why are we here again? In our original post, we expressed some surprise that they had not coloured the helmet to match the actual Darth Vader visage, even going so far as to do a mock-up of what we thought the coin should have looked like (below). Fast forward a year…

In all the relevant respects, this is exactly the same, as you can see above, except for the application of black colouring. It looks to be digital colour rather than an application of rhodium/ruthenium/black nickel, but whatever the case, it’s a much closer representation of this incredibly well known character than it was before.

Packaging on the original was really first class and that is in evidence here as well. The rarity factor is considerably higher. The debut variant had a limit of 5,000 pieces, which even given how well done the coin was, turned out to be a touch high, as they’re still available. No such problems this time as the mintage of the black variant is capped at just 250 pieces.

So all is well? Not quite. Now, we’ve only seen these at EMK in Germany at the moment, but they sport a near €400 price tag. With the original on sale at the mint for sub $170 USD, that’s a hard sell for us. A cool issue, but not a great value one, in our opinion. Available to order now.

SPECIFICATION
DENOMINATION $5 NZD (Niue)
COMPOSITION 0.999 silver
WEIGHT 62.2 grams
DIMENSIONS 49.0 x 41.0 mm
FINISH Proof
MODIFICATIONS Dimensional, coloured
MINTAGE 250
BOX / C.O.A. Yes / Yes