About a week ago I got an email from NGC with a coupon code and offer for $10 off any tier of paid membership, which would have made the lowest ($25) level just $15 for a year. I’ve been debating becoming a paid member again for a while as some may be aware from past entries, but this lowered the threshold for doing so enough to get me to go ahead and do it.

Honestly, as much time as I spend on here lately, I think it makes sense to support the site / company a little directly, even though I support it indirectly anyway by helping create a market for their services.

The main thing in this for me is that it lowers the threshold for certain pathways of set development. So far I’ve been able to grow my 10G set by buying graded examples but I think it’s going to be hard to do that if I want to pick up the rest of the set. I’ve recently seen raw examples of the 1885 and 1880 come up for sale but I’ve never seen graded examples come up for sale - there aren’t a lot of them out there. This has had me thinking about the future of that set.

I’ve talked a lot about crossing the MS67 PCGS-graded 1875 10G that I have but in the last few months I’ve been questioning whether or not that’s the route I’ll go for. It may end up staying in PCGS plastic and one day I may just pick up an MS66 1875 in an NGC old-fatty older just to continue that set theme of the old-fatties. That option has had a lot of appeal lately after picking up the 1877 in the old fatty.

This also makes it easier to cross over the PCGS graded 1932 quarter we have in the 1932 mint set - something I don’t know that we’re 100% committed to yet but it’s come up in discussion a few times with my step father in the last 6 months because he’d like to see that set be a fully NGC graded set.

This could also become a pathway for rounding out the Zimbabwe set with some of the more obscure issues.

But, yeah, we'll call that an effective advertisement / offer.