The three four brands that are available around here are Lawrence, West Coast, Spartan, and Eagle. Eagle being the most common. Average cost for all of them is $56 at the moment. This is for magnum (hard shot, small amounts of antimony is alloyed in). Chilled is the soft stuff. My preferred manufacturer is Spartan. It's clean, smooth, well coated with graphite, and very consistent in size. Lawrence and West Coast are comparable. Their sizing is not quite as good being off by a thousandth or two which in the grand scheme of things is a big DMS. The Eagle is a little wacky. Dump a couple ounces into a paper plate and start looking closely and measuring. Eagle runs under size by several thousandths. You will also find instances of two and three pellets welded together or misshaped (teardrop shapes). Eagle Magnum is in fact hard, possibly the hardest of the bunch. It consistently drops light out of my presses. Granted not by much but still light. Again, DMS. I use my reloads for practice, Sporting Clays, FITASC, and American Field Sporting. For competition, registered targets, I use factory ammo. Most often Fiocchi Crusher and/or Little Rhino. Having said all this I do use the Eagle product. For all its shortcomings it does work and it is the most available and a dollar or two cheaper. My son and I shoot a lot of shells in a week, two to three cases, sometimes more, almost never less. All our 12ga loads are one ounce at 1250fps.
When I started reloading shot shells 59 years ago, if I remember correctly, shot was about $2.50 a 25 pound bag. I did my loading with a Lee whack-a-mole setup on the kitchen floor.
