500 coins

[Angus]

With the issue of Finland's second coin for 2023 today, there have now been 500 different commemorative 2 euro coins issued since Greece issued the first one in 2004 for the Olympics.

Full list here

[chrisild]

Cool overview!  Yes, five hundred now. And I am tempted to add a "sigh" ...

Had vague plans to bring this up here, but you were faster. In a German forum, "numisfreund" even started looking back on Friday. Apparently he had a lot of time over the weekend, hehe, and made a comprehensive list of coins, their occasions, how many are now issued per year (hint: way too many IMO), and so on.

Problem with these issues is that their mintages vary extremely. Of course this can partly be explained by different country sizes. But you still have lots of issues with extremely low production volumes even in relation to the issuing member state's population. Even worse, contrary to the original intention more than 100 of those 500 are "NIFC" (not intended for circulation) – they were issued in coincards, sets etc. only.

Add that to the sheer volume, and it becomes obvious why people do not collect these coins any more. Don't get me wrong, they are still sought after, and many still end up in collections, but being "complete" is pretty much impossible even if you leave different mintmarks and such aside. So people will be "pickier" these days: They may be after certain theme series only, or ignore everything that was not issued at face (even if they pay a little more than FV anyway), or decide that, in the case of a common issue, one coin is enough to "represent" all twenty-something pieces, etc.

[Bimat]

500? Well, that just means I'm missing may be 200 of them.  

The Finnish ones I like most, followed by Greek, Italian and French (2008 French issue was a howler though.) German commemoratives are nice too, but perhaps too similar because of the theme. Like the Estonian €2 commemorating Paul Keres/Chess too.

Aditya