Now that the world-class Tyrant Collection of Eagles has posted its inventory on its custom-designed website, we can use it as a baseline of comparison against other great specialized collections.

*1871-CC PCGS MS62+, image from The Tyrant Collection*

I thought it would be fun to compare the Carson City eagles from the Tyrant Collection with those from the DL Hansen Collection.

A few caveats before we crunch the numbers. The Tyrant coins, in many cases, have been off the market for a decade or more and they haven’t been regraded or crossed-over from NGC to PCGS. There are almost certainly a number of coins from this collection which would upgrade if resubmitted. The Tyrant Collection also has a much longer history than the Hansen Collection. If I’m not mistaken, the owner of the Tyrant coins has been an active collector of Ten Dollar gold pieces for at least 15-20 years, while Hansen has been active for four or five.

Many of the Carson City eagles in Hansen’s set are from the Northern California Collection which I sold to him via private treaty in July 2019. There are many exceptional coins in this set, including a number with CAC approval. If we were using a sophisticated weighting system, such coins would increase in point value. The scoring system I’m going to us isn’t weighted so it isn’t as sophisticated as what PCGS or NGC use on their registries. I’m simply adding the grades (with a “plus” grade given an extra half a point) and dividing them by 19 which is the number of issues struck. This system has its flaws as it values an MS65 1891-CC eagle more than it does an MS62 1872-CC, which is clearly a more valuable and numismatically interesting issue.

Let’s look at the grades of the two Carson City eagle sets and then analyze them:

  
    Date

    Tyrant 
Collection
    Hansen 
Collection
    Winner

  

    1870-CC
    P53
    P55
    Hansen
  

    1871-CC
    P62+
    P58
    Tyrant
  

    1872-CC
    N62
    P50
    Tyrant
  

    1873-CC
    P53
    P58
    Hansen
  

    1874-CC
    P55
    P53
    Tyrant
  

    1875-CC
    P55
    P53
    Tyrant
  

    1876-CC
    N58
    P53
    Tyrant
  

    1877-CC
    P58
    P58
    Tie
  

    1878-CC
    N58
    P58
    Tie
  

    1879-CC
    N58
    P58
    Tie
  

    1880-CC
    N62
    P61
    Tyrant
  

    1881-CC
    P62
    P61
    Tyrant
  

    1882-CC
    N62
    P58+
    Tyrant
  

    1883-CC
    P61
    P60
    Tyrant
  

    1884-CC
    P62
    P61
    Tyrant
  

    1890-CC
    P64
    P63+
    Tyrant
  

    1891-CC
    N65
    P63
    Tyrant
  

    1892-CC
    N64
    P62
    Tyrant
  

    1893-CC
    N62
    P62
    Tyrant
  

    19 Coins
    1144.5
    11.08
    
  

If we add the 19 issues up and divide the cumulative total by the number issues, we get an average score per coin which is as follows:

Tyrant: 60.23
Hansen: 58.26

If we measure the two collections on a coin by coin basis, we arrive at the following results:

Tyrant: 14
Hansen: 2
Tie: 3

And what if we just measure the rare 1870s issues? Assuming that the less interesting issues from the 1880s and the 1890s carry a lot of weight for the Tyrant Collection, as there are some very high grades for the 1890-CC, 1891-CC, and the 1892-CC.

*1873-CC $10.00 PCGS AU58 CAC, Hansen Collection*

Looking solely at the 10 dates from the 1870s, the cumulative value of the Tyrant coins is 580.5 or 58.05 per coin. The Hansen coins from this decade have a cumulative score of 556 or a per coin average of 55.60.

The most logical way for Hansen to catch–up with Tyrant on the 1870s dates is to improve his 1872-CC (which is only an AU50), and to also try and find 1874-CC, 1875-CC, and 1876-CC eagles which grade AU55 or even AU58 if available.

As I stated in the introduction, the Tyrant Collection has a big advantage over the Hansen Collection when it comes to Eagles as the former is specialized (the owner collects no other denominations than $10 gold), while the latter is trying to be complete for all series from 1793 to the present.

The undisputed winner is the Tyrant Collection, at least as far as Carson City eagles go.

Eagles