Building 3 Registry Sets that each have over 300 slots, one of them now at 400!

This year has been one of winding down the volume of coins I add to my collection each year. I retired at the end of last year and it's very expensive to keep up all of the sets I have. I decided to narrow it down to a few and after this year will narrow down even more.

As I was reviewing my Sets, I was curious on a few of the larger ones how many slots they each have. There are now 3 that have over 300 slots, hence my naming them "The Super Registry Sets". This doesn't mean I think they are superior than other sets in any way, just pointing out the large number of slots compared to the vast majority of other Registry Sets and the number of slots they have.

I wanted to briefly review each of them, so I thought I would split my journal for this into 3 parts, one for each of the "Super" Sets.

The first I want to review is the "World Sets Canada - Commemorative Silver $20, 1985-2016, Proof" set. There is currently 352 slots in this set. I still need 7 to complete it, but a couple of these have been impossible to find over the last decade of looking for them. These are the 1986 Plain Edge Olympic coins, only 1 of the 4 I have acquired. I haven't even seen the other 3 up for sale.

If you look at the number of slots by year, you can see the ramp up in volume over the last few years:

2010 - 8

2011 - 12

2012 - 16

2013 - 35

2014 - 66

2015 - 65

2016 - 61 (so far)

Looking back at the early years, there were simple designs starting with the 1985 through 1987 Olympic coins. They were followed by the first coins in this Set that had Gilt added to them, the Aviation Series. Interesting in these early years they only had one theme for each year, Olympics for 1985, 1986 & 1987, and then the Gilt Aviation Series for each year 1990 through 1999. The next group of coins that came out from 2000 through 2002 the Mint added the Hologram feature to the coins for these years, then followed those from 2003 to date with a mixture of features, Gilt, Hologram and Colorization for the years to follow. In 2007 the Mint released the first of the "Crystal" coins, ones that had several crystals embedded in the coins. The following years saw a continued mix of all of the varieties in the coins released. The next novel feature to come out was the Murano Glass Ladybug coin. This has become one of the more expensive coins to buy ungraded, typically going for $750+ at auction. The Ladybug was followed by many other Murano Glass figures in the years that followed, fortunately coming down significantly in price. Around 2012 the Ultra High Relief coins started coming out, along with the beginning of the Glow In The Dark coins. Since then a variety of all these types and features have been issued each year, with more new features being added - wood inlay, 3D Water Droplet, etc.

When you combine these numbers with all of the other coins for all of the other denominations the Royal Canadian Mint spews out each year, it makes the ability of collecting all of the issues impossible for all but a few and forces many of us to have to choose only 1 or 2 sets to try and keep up with. I will probably try, initially anyway, to keep up with the $20 series.

Cheers,

Dan

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