Archery 50p (2011)

Archery was struck in bigger numbers than any other London 2012 50p, so circulated examples are easy to find and condition sets the price. Coins with clear finger detail and a bright surface are worth more than worn, dull ones. Brilliant uncirculated coins from the Royal Mint's Archery coin card or the Archery coin cover sell above coins from change, most of all in unopened packaging.

With 3,345,500 struck for circulation, the Archery 50p is the 38th rarest of the 81 ranked 50p designs and has the 86th lowest mintage of all 194 circulating UK designs. That puts it in the Uncommon band, for mintages 2,500,000 to 9,999,999.

The next rarer 50p is the Suffragettes 50p, with 3,124,030 struck, and the next more common is the WWF 50p, with 3,400,000 struck.

The Archery 50p shows a hand, not a whole archer: fingers drawing a bowstring, with the tail of an arrow on the string and the coin's left edge standing in for the bow. Then check the logo. Where most Olympic 50ps show the five rings inside the 0 of 2012, this one has the three curved Paralympic agitos and the words Paralympic Games. The heads side is dated 2011, and no varieties are recorded.

Piotr Powaga designed the Archery 50p for the Royal Mint's open competition to find a coin for each sport at the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. His starting point was a link between the sports of the ancient world and the modern Games, which drew him to archery. He decided early against drawing a whole figure and looked instead for one detail that held the essence of the sport. The archer's eye and straining muscles were too much to fit on a coin, so he asked his wife to hold something and mime pulling a bow, and built the design from her hand. The reverse is a close-up of that hand: three fingers hooked on the string, the thumb bent downward and the little finger angled away, with the end of an arrow resting on the string. The left rim of the coin doubles as the front of the bow. Although archery is also an Olympic event, the logo at the top is the Paralympic version, with three agitos inside the 0 and the words Paralympic Games.

It was one of the 30 coins in the Olympic set issued in 2011.