ATB Five Ounce Silver Coins

In summary, there was a lot of hoopla regarding the program when it began in late 2010. The mint released all of the 2010 bullion pucks in December of that year. Most dealers sold them as sets, and they were in very high demand. They ended up selling on the secondary market for thousands of dollars. The unc pucks were released one at a time in 2011. They were priced considerably above spot. As the price of silver rose to its peak in Apr 2011, the mint stupidly thought that there would still be a high demand for the bullion pucks, despite the high price and relative lack of popularity of the parks. So they minted 4 times as many bullion pucks at the beginning of 2011 as they did for the 2010 issues.

It seems it was around this time that a lot of collectors abandoned the series. The bullion pucks were too expensive b/c of the price of silver. The unc pucks were still priced at a good premium above those. The 2010 pucks were falling in value. 2012 saw the lowest mintages of the pucks. People thought the program would be discontinued (title of thread).

However, the silver price continued to tank. The pucks for the first time became affordable, which is why I began collecting them last year. A lot of the discussion on the tread during that time has been speculation about what mintage numbers will be on current issues. This is because the values of those rare 2012 issues have skyrocketed.

Good history for those who just started collecting recently - which also explains why those from a few years ago are higher than others

Man...barry you seem to be on a roll. That is a very clean coin! I wish my purchase of the bullion coins ended up being that nice - they seldom are!

@Barry - man you take some fantastic pictures of the pucks! Thanks for posting.

That really does look beautiful.

That's a good summary article. With GSM not selling out yet, I wonder if 30k for Shenendoah makes sense.

We'll find out what the mintage numbers were on the second puck soon enough but unless a lot of people dropped their subscription, the 2nd puck will be nearly sold out if they didn't raise the mintage numbers. Raising the mintage number allows more subscriptions and people that do not subscribe to get the pucks if they missed out. There is plenty of time left in the year to sell the extra 5k pucks and every "P" puck will be sold out by year's end.

So the Smokey's are sold out