Football, baseball, athletics, and even winter sports are all popular subjects for the collectible coin market. As they’re popular in the real world, it’s hardly surprising that they’d be good numismatic representation. Most coins are based around big tournaments, an obvious focal point in an industry built around commemoration, or increasingly, around individual sportsmen, like the Mint of Gdańsk’s new Robert Lewandowski range.

The two new issues we’re looking at today are focused on the game, rather than the individual. The first, is for cricket, and themed around a big multinational tournament. The other, for darts, looks at the tools of the trade specifically. Both tie in with MDM’s reputation for trying something new, with the darts set in particular, being exceptionally unique. Both should be available to order now. A neat detour from the usual offerings.

A sport seemingly growing in popularity, and especially in Commonwealth countries, it’s always suffered from the sheer length of each game, usually five days for Test Matches. However, efforts over the last couple of decades to make it more accessible have met with unqualified success. The T20 World Cup tournament, the latest one of which finished earlier this month and was won by England, limits each team to just one innings of twenty, six-ball overs each. As a result, it’s usually over in less than three hours, making it considerably more fast-paced, and easier to enjoy.

There ave been a few cricket coins over the years, but MDM’s latest is one of their cast, hollow, spherical offerings, usually seen reproducing a planetary body, In this case it’s in the form of a cricket ball, complete with the characteristic stitching, although that’s just colour here. On the front of the sphere sits the official logo of the tournament, held in Australia, who had won the previous World Cup.

The obverse side carries the national emblem of the issuing country – Barbados. It’s all boxed, with a frame that makes display relatively easy. A rare numismatic treat for cricket fans, the small mintage of 500, and the relatively competitive price (this is a one-ounce silver coin) give this added appeal.

Well, this one is quite the surprise! The coin world is no stranger to sporting coins, but darts is a very rare beast indeed. With a dartboard the same shape as a coin, you would think the obvious way forward would be reproducing one in silver coin form, but MDM have taken a far more innovative, and unusual approach. What we have here is, quite literally, silver darts. Each of the three darts in the set consists of a 22 gram shaft, and a 1 gram ‘flight’ They’re removable and interchangeable.

Each shaft has a different design, and each flight is also different in shape and artwork. Issued for Samoa, the flights carry that island nation’s emblem on them. It all comes in a very cool box, exactly as you’d expect a real set of darts to be stored. Very unusual, something you know we love here, these won’t appeal to everyone, of course, but darts fans, and collectors of the unusual, will surely want to check these out.