Most Current Doubled Die And Variation Resources

I use Variety Vistas - it is fairly comprehensive and much easier than Wexler's (in my opinion) to navigate.

Usually when I look for Doubling, RPM's, or other varieties.
First, I'll sort out my coins by year and mint. Then I go to VV and see what has been reported and go to the coins and look for that.
Second, I got to CCF if I think I have something not listed.

I use all three of these sites:
http://www.coppercoins.com/advsearch.php
http://varietyvista.com/
http://doubleddie.com/
John1

I do nickel coin roll hunting, so I use Brian's Variety Coins a lot. BVC is basically the nickel portion of the Wexler doubled die site, but Brian Ribar is keeping it up to date. You can find many listings for 2006-2023 nickels there.

I also use Variety Vista, although I disagree with Dearborn that VV is easier to navigate than Wexler. One thing that makes doubleddie.com easier to navigate is that it puts many listings on one long page. That way, you can use the Find function in your browser to easily search for text strings. On VV, you have to navigate each listing using those clunky buttons, and it isn't easily searchable with your browser tools.

For the most popular doubled dies, you can't beat PCGS and NGC VarietyPlus. To just get an overview for a particular denomination, NGC-VP is the best. They don't have as many pictures for diagnostics, but the top-down overview is the better than any others. For Cherrypicker Guide varieties that are attributed by PCGS, you can't beat their full color pictures. The diagnostic sites (WDD, BVC, CC, VV) give you only tiny pictures of the details at high magnification, often only in grayscale. For popular Fivaz-Stanton varieties, you can use the diagnostic sites to identify the interesting features, then look up the coin on PCGS directly. It is super helpful to be able to see the entire coin in high resolution color. Remember that for any coin where you can view the image in their viewer, you can also download a much bigger file version from the upper right corner icon. Often PCGS will have multiple versions of the coin posted in different grades, so you can see what the variety looks like with different levels of wear, strike sharpness, toning. I also find it helpful that if I am not sure that a particular feature is distorted by doubling, I can simply navigate to the standard version of the coin and examine those high resolution images for comparison. One feature that is buried on the PCGS coin pages is a drop-down box for varieties for a particular coin, allowing you to switch between the regular and variety pages.

One place where Variety Vista does shine is the overview of mint mark styles, the summary pages for DDO / DDR for all dates and mint marks, and the listings of design changes for the obverse and reverse. Embedded in those pages are a lot of FS varieties and collectible wrinkles concerning rare mint marks, rare OBV/REV pairings, and quirky design varieties that aren't DDO / DDR/RPM.

One last site that seems to escape notice sometimes. GreatCollections.com is an auction site focused on variety coins. Accounts are free. One thing that you can do is look at historical auctions, particularly recent coins, for the variety you are researching. Grab the NGC, PCGS, ANACS certification numbers off the slabs. Many of those will have been imaged on their web sites. That will also let you see what the variety coin looks like in full color across the entire surface, although sometimes the resolution isn't that great (apparently you have to pay extra for the high quality imaging service).

Thankyou so much for your replies everyone. Sometimes I feel like I am looking too hard and need to let up, bit it drives me crazy when I find 1 or 2 of the occourances on a particular variety but can't match the last 1 or 2 markers. I'll definitely check all of these out.

1. Wish all the new collectors here would use it. The number of confused posts here that could be saved by someone just checking Wexler's is immense.

2. No. Absolutely use it.

3. Not really. You just get better at using the resources that are out there efficiently as you do it more.

4. Variety Vista, Wexler's, and Coppercoins are the three main sites for varieties. In general, they have more or less the same information presented in different ways with different indexing, but there are certain things that will be on one site but not another because it simply hasn't been submitted to all three sites yet. For errors, check out error-ref.com for information on general error types and what they look like. For die events, maddieclashes and cudsoncoins are useful resources as well.

5. That really depends, but I find that in general, Wexler's keeps more up-to-date information on ultra-modern coins, while VV and CC lag behind a bit in attributions for the latest dates.

Edit: as E&V said, crdievarieties is also good. It was founded by Billy Crawford, a renowned variety expert, and passed to Tanner Scott, who recently took over Wexler's as well. I don't know if he plans to merge the listings or keep them separate. Tanner is one of the most knowledgeable users here on the forum, and goes by Tanman2001

I use pcgs coinfacts for most of the varieties I look for, variety vista as second. Coinfacts has full coin pictures and lets you figure out die markers, mint mark positions, etc. The only downside is that it is only for certain recognized varieties.

If you are re-photographing the reference coins, might I recommend including a color photo of the entire coin face? That helps to put the features into relative perspective, and is currently only available on PCGS.

@Tanman my bad! I thought I had heard that somewhere, but must have just gotten some wires crossed