Charizard ex Hyper Rare

Rather embarrassingly, the official Pokémon website is still pretending Gold cards are too exciting and secret to show in the catalogues. While this was once a cute idea to suggest some cards were “Secret Rares,” with the loss of this designation, it’s probably about time to lose the gimmick, too.

Especially given how, since the dawn of this new era, collectors seem to have abandoned Gold cards as cruelly as they did Rainbow Rares a couple of years ago. After the initial excitement of, “Oooh, shiny,” people have come to realize they amount to the same thing: The same as the regular version of the card, but less pretty. So it is that the technically secret “Hyper Rare” version of Charizard is currently almost half of the price of the Special Illustration Rare.

Still, if Gold cards have their day again in the future, you can imagine this could be worth hanging onto, currently selling for around $58