Citeer: "Oklahoman"In theory a Numista Rarity is fluid. Can you search by mintage? That can be a much better way of determining rarity if you link it to a scale.
Mintage is pretty much only useful for determining rarity within a series (which normally means "within a single Numista page"), and if you try to use it for cross-series comparisons you lose accuracy completely. (
This coin has a mintage that would ordinarily be considered very low, but its rarity is only 25, and examples can be obtained easily.)
Also, it is often the case that the mintage is large but most examples were melted down or otherwise destroyed, resulting in high mintage and high rarity.
[EDIT: and in many cases the mintage is just not available, and/or entirely unknown; I suspect most Swiss Cantons coins are in that category.]
Mind you, the current rarity scale has its own problems (
this type is so common I'm tired of seeing it but has rarity 77 - admittedly that could be due to the sheer proliferation of minor varieties that are often off flan and/or unreadable - while
this type has rarity 27 but I've never seen a single example).
