How Many Countries To Collect?

OK, maybe I am in better shape than I thought. Relative to the list posted above by Wade, I lack 19/208 in the Coin-Issuing Country category, lack 6/25 in the "no longer existing" category, and lack 22/27 {sheepish grin} in the NCLT category. Some of those "missing" I may actually "have," just annotated differently in my inventory.

I have an entry marked as "have" in my inventory for a coin from Saharawi that doesn't appear on the above list or the Numista list. Is that just Western Sahara (not near my collection at the moment to check)? But I have a separate "have" entry for Western Sahara. I also have a coin I annotated from Saint Thomas and Prince that doesn't appear in either list. Did I simply do a terminology error?

Looks like I oughta set up a Numista account, eh {grin}

Yes, Saharawi is Western Sahara.

Saint Thomas and Prince is the same place as São Tome & Principe, which is a present-day country.

Okay, time for me to eat crow. I was rearranging my albums and guess what I found? Yep a Saarland coin {grin}. In my inventory, but not checked off of my "countries left to get list." Please pass the salt.

I tried to do that early on, but I quickly realized that I'm going to run out of money very fast if I do it that way - even if "reasonably cheap" is limited to 10-20 cents per coin. (Sadly it is hard to find coins any cheaper than that outside bulk lots - in which one obviously cannot control the variety.)

Incidentally, South Ossetian coins are essentially fantasies (unlike Abkhazian coins, which are technically official, though also borderline exonumia).

Just to go by something, I go by numista's list, which is ever-evolving. There's a certain amount of arbitrariness, but always comes back to how you want to collect.

Numista lumps together some countries I'd rather separate (RSFSR/USSR, Portuguese Guinea/Guinea-Bissau, British Guiana/Guyana), and there are a few weird splits as well (perhaps the most obvious is German states vs. Austrian states - either keep them all separately, or lump them all together: Salzburg, Baden and Julich-Berg are either one country or three).

I currently have 191 countries listed in my Numista collection (192 if my pending addition of my Pantikapaion coin goes through). There are also about 15-20 countries I have but hadn't entered into Numista yet (notably Uzbekistan and GDR), a few countries I separate but Numista doesn't (including all three pairs above), and half a dozen assorted German states (plus two Italian states).

Many of the hardest Numista countries, incidentally, are not ancient or medieval but short-lived colonies from the 18th and 19th century. (That or modern countries that are part of larger monetary unions and thus don't ordinarily produce their own money, but did make some low-mintage NCLT.)
Though many of the medieval ones are also tricky.