December 22, 2008: "Condition Rarity"

Author:
J. Agre

Concept:
We bought this coin because we liked it, but also because it’s so unusual to see such a nice, wholesome, well worn example of this cool design.

Most of these tend to be AU or better, with an ‘affordable’ piece typically being an impaired, awful, cleaned, tooled or otherwise hideous one. But this is an attractive, original coin, and one of just 3 (out of 2,293 examples of this type graded by PCGS!) in VG – making this quite literally an ‘ultimate’ condition rarity.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
The only changes we considered were things I would term ‘clerical’ in nature, including the more direct "The ultimate condition rarity.", but that seemed too presumptuous and argumentative.

So then we moved to "Quite possibly the ultimate condition rarity.", but this felt sort of weak and timid.

So we went with the confident, yet unassuming middle-ground version in the final ad. And we liked it.