Site updates to guides and profiles for late April and early May

A quick update of our updates. There are many small ones not outlined here, but these are the main additions to our existing guides. It’s important to let you know that once these profiles and guides are published, they aren’t just left to languish and die, but are actively renewed on a regular basis. In some cases, like the aged Star Wars coin guide, they get completely refreshed to take advantage of the general evolution of the site look.

We do have plans for more, and I’m thinking that a themed guide to dinosaur coins might be pretty popular, although as always, we’re open to suggestions. I’ve heard that domed coins might be an interesting choice, Royal Australian Mint bullion, maybe one rounding up football issues for the upcoming World Cup, or even meteorite coins. I’m open to suggestions, as always. Bullion and Coin profiles will continue, but have suffered since late 2021 because of the flood of new issues taking up so much time. Clearing that backlog continues. I often promise new guides here, but I’m going to forego that this time, as we miss them more often than not, lately.

I also have to apologise for small site outages. We have an issue with one of our plugins flooding our host server resources with scheduled tasks that has been a real pita to track down. I’ve found an excellent, and reasonably priced developer to fix it, and I think it’s almost there. It’s been a real drain on time and enthusiasm, as my knowledge of backend processes isn’t top drawer, but it’s in good hands now.

Thanks for reading. The site should be back to a more balanced and regular selection of articles now, and we’ll have a couple of Quicklooks up later today. Please feel free to donate if you like what the site brings to the hobby. One of only a couple of remaining affiliate schemes, the Perth Mint, has just ended, so we’re down there, and it’s a tough grind even with it. Fortunately, our advertisers help, without whom we couldn’t continue. Thank you all.

Have a great week, and keep collecting! Mik

STAR WARS THEMATIC GUIDE

Now, this was one of our first themed guides, and keeping track of the New Zealand Mint’s copious Star Wars output absolutely required it. As a result, it has aged in layout, and become increasingly wonky to navigate.

As a result, it’s been extensively refreshed with a new layout, including optimised specification tables, and the images being given separate columns, all of which are in a newer, much more responsive order.

Also, it’s been brought up to date, missing just the latest Sandcrawler coins which I’m in the process of formatting. It isn’t quite finished yet, with a lot of the text descriptions needing revising, but it’s fundamentally there.

Hope this one is good for the fans, which given the number of coins in this range, must be legion.

VIDEO GAME COIN THEMATIC GUIDE

We’ve already mentioned this one, but it’s had new additions, and we’re expecting more to come soon.

A massive part of popular culture, video games first started trickling into the coin world only around four years ago, but since then, there’s been a veritable eruption of new series, both coins, and rounds, the latter primarily from APMEX.

Because of that, the guide has grown quickly, and will no doubt continue to do so. Those who love these will find them all here, those that don’t can ignore them now.

PERTH MINT LIMITED MINTAGE BULLION GUIDE

We were pretty pleased to get this guide finished, as tracking down every release isn’t the easiest thing in the world, but it’s turned out to be worth the effort, as it’s made the task of covering these very popular coins so much easier.

The Wombat, and the latest Chines Myths and Legends coin, the Phoenix, have been added, along with a few tweaks here and there.

Thanks to a nice lady at the Perth Mint, we finally have good quality images of the third-ounce platinum bullion series, and their associated silver and gold variants. That series is comparatively little known, but they are pretty cool. We’ll add them shortly.

SCOTTSDALE MINT LIMITED MINTAGE BULLION

Quite a bit older than the Perth Mint guide, the one for Scottsdale Mint is even busier, however. Scottsdale Mint has numerous bullion coin series underway at any one time, so a round-up like this is useful to keep track of them.

It still needs a few tweaks, and we’ll update the status of each series as soon as possible.

There have been several new additions lately, both new series (Giraffe) and new entrants in existing ones (Trident, Mandrill), all listed out in the article changelog.

THE NEW ZEALAND MINT’S CHIBI

Chibi continues its campaign to dominate the numismatic world, with more new issues, and the first Special Edition. Released for the Star Wars ‘May the Forth’ celebration, it’s the first time gilding has been used in this series.

Whether this will open the floodgates to more specials or not, is yet to be determined, but the usual release schedule will continue regardless. We’re expecting another four issues in May, as usual!

PLANETS & GODS BY MINT XXI

An unusual look at our Solar System, Mint XXI’s ‘Planets & Gods’ combines a view of an ancient deity that either gave their name to, or is the personification of, a planet, and overlays it on a background with a coloured image of the world.

Quite a classy series, they’ve just added what may well be the last two coins, Earth, and the Moon, both in a slightly lighter format. They could well continue it, given the amount of large moons in our system that are similarly named (Phobos, Pluto, etc.), but we’ll have to wait and see.

Whatever the future, the past is now enshrined in our Coin Series Profile.

LUNAR YEAR COLLECTION BY CIT

The latest in the eclectic lunar range from the masters at CIT has been added to its Coin Series Profile as well. In typical lunar coin style, it’s an early issue of the 2023 coin for the Year of the Rabbit.

As always, a fun mix of fully dimensional silver, minigold, and silver banknote make up the range. Fortunately, CIT’s superb coin photography continues, so you get to see actual, high-quality images of their releases.