Well, this turned into a harrowing experience fast!
I was up tonight (luckily) so I checked the Royal Mint website at what would have been 8 AM in the UK, and it told me orders would be opening at 9 AM. Ok, no problem, I can wait an hour.
Lost track of time, so I was half hour late getting on. Imagine my surprise when I did and got a prompt that there was a queue in progress, not to close my browser or refresh, and that I was 4971st in line...
Ok... thankfully it didn't take super long to get to my turn... about 20 minutes or so. I quickly discovered that a) the Tolkien coin was indeed only being sold as part of that 2023 commemorative set, and b) most of the different types of sets were already sold out!
Yeah, panic time.
While I dithered trying to work out exchange rates, the set I was going for that was still available when I was checking came back as sold out by the time I tried to add it to cart.
That left me with three options:
The $10,000 gold-proof set of LE 150
The LE regular set of 7,500
The no edition set with just the loose coins
I went for option two because it was only double the cost of the third and comes with a nice holder for all the coins.
Man... didn't think they would go that fast.
P.S. - They do talk about a Definitive Set *possibly* coming out later in the year, but without knowing whether that's for sure, what it entails, or how much it will cost, I wasn't about to take any chances. Just glad I was able to get one of the limited sets.
Oh, and despite registering for the email, I never did get one.