Along with the Perth Mint’s Marvel Superheroes series and the NZ Mint’s own Disney coins, Star Wars has made the transition from proof commemorative to bullion with some success. Launching in 2017, the series debuted with the biggest movie villain of them all, Darth Vader. This ultra-iconic character has been a stalwart of the series. Each Vader design has followed a strict artistic style, one we call bas-relief inspired. This involves an image being formed from simpler elements, eschewing fine detail for a cruder, high contrast look. It’s actually pretty effective, although one you either love or hate. There’s a disappointing lack of difference between the Vader coins in particular, but all are neat enough in their own right. The others have a more natural style of art.

Two formats on offer, both a troy ounce in weight. The choice is either 0.999 silver or 0.999 gold. The design of both is fundamentally the same. Packaging is, as you’d expect, limited to a capsule, although you can buy tubes of 25 silver coins, and even a monster box containing ten tubes. Until the latest release, the mintage of the silver coin has been capped at 250,000 pieces, with the gold at just 10% of this number. Darth Vader III changed all that, with the silver dropping to just 100,000 pieces, and the gold to a positively tiny 1,000 units. Mintages have continued to shrink, as the choice in the bullion market has increased.

UPDATE: Issues marked with a * in their title bar use the alternative obverse design, using the Public Seal of Niue, without the effigy of QEII. We’ve divided the range up into subsets, but the distinction is ours and not the mints as far as we can tell, but this does seem to be the pattern in the various releases.