Franklin Halves Vs. Ikes

You will have to decide what you want .. and how much you want to spend.

Doing a nice looking AU/BU set in either Ike of Franklin coin can be fun and
easy to do.

Doing a High grade slabed set, will take much more money and time.

It is up to you to decide how much you want to spend and what grades they will be to make to you happy with the set. Collect for yourself not for what others think you should do. Because there are good people that are happy with circulated coins and good people that only want top grades.

I'm with night hawk, go with the silver, but both is cool

Both of my sets are in Dansco albums, so the answer is to buy both raw and slabbed (whichever you find), but break the slabs for the albums.

Now, I will add that one of my long-term-in-future plans is to build a second, high-end Eisenhower dollar set. That one will be slabbed and stay slabbed.

Of course, such a set would be beyond a beginner's budget; so go for the albums and buy what you can.