That's awesome! Finding new pieces for my Buffalo Nickel set slowed down so last year I decided to search through the Registry sets and find smaller ones without much activity that wouldn't be difficult to complete.  I was thinking, if anything I can put together a set for display and in best case scenario I can win a best new set award.  Last year it was the Austria 2 Schilling, 1928-1937, Circulation Issue set.  Thought I'd be done in one year but having difficult tracking down a Mozart that doesn't look circulated.

Anyhow, it's super satisfying to see the Top Pop icon next to a coin so if you get a set with all of them - that's even cooler.

"winning by default"    I can totally relate to this.  While I did not win any financial awards I have 4 best in category awards for a set that had (still has) one coin in the set but to my surprise nobody else had or put together a set for several years.   It was a very cheap win and fun in its own way for the time it lasted.  

1 hour ago, Crawtomatic said:

That's awesome! Finding new pieces for my Buffalo Nickel set slowed down so last year I decided to search through the Registry sets and find smaller ones without much activity that wouldn't be difficult to complete.  I was thinking, if anything I can put together a set for display and in best case scenario I can win a best new set award.  Last year it was the Austria 2 Schilling, 1928-1937, Circulation Issue set.  Thought I'd be done in one year but having difficult tracking down a Mozart that doesn't look circulated.

Anyhow, it's super satisfying to see the Top Pop icon next to a coin so if you get a set with all of them - that's even cooler.

Yeah… I've thought about doing things like that in the past but I just don't like the idea of loading up on a bunch of coins I don't particularly care about and wouldn't necessarily want / buy otherwise just to compete for awards here. As Coinbuf kind of alludes to it works well until someone else comes along and decides to thump you in the skull. And if that happens then you're just stuck being #2 (then #3, then #4) in a category with a bunch of coins you didn't want that much in the first place. That's my reasoning anyway. if you actually like and want to collect Austrian shillings then more power to ya. 

I've had this happen recently in my Zimbabwe competitive sets with someone with deep pockets stomping me in a big way, but my set still "wins" on the basis of presentation and attention to varieties and sub-types IMO ("I reject your reality and substitute my own!" lol). I keep expecting someone to come up and give me a hard time with the 10G set, but, as a set of gold coins, and the 1888 in my set, at least beating that set isn't a trivial task.

7 minutes ago, Coinbuf said:

"winning by default"    I can totally relate to this.  While I did not win any financial awards I have 4 best in category awards for a set that had (still has) one coin in the set but to my surprise nobody else had or put together a set for several years.   It was a very cheap win and fun in its own way for the time it lasted. 

To quote the immortal words of Homer Simpson, "De fault! De fault! De fault! The two sweetest words in the English language!"

Yeah. It's fun. It doesn't do much other than to just show that you can't take all of this too seriously the way some do. I don't know what this will look like yet but I'm hoping to build that set out to have nice descriptions and discussions and have it be a nice addition to my overall Zimbabwe collection / supplement to the note collection in the Registry.

It had occurred to me that I was giving up the chance to see how long that Zimbabwe coin set could continue winning awards with its 16-point lonesome self, but I'd rather build out this set to compliment the notes the way it was meant to.