Summary
- An extremely rare Team Fortress 2 cosmetic item was traded for over $40,000.
- The rare Crone’s Dome has a series of now-removed modifiers attached.
- Essentially, a cool hat was made even cooler by now unavailable visual effects.
Valve‘s introduction of trading to Steam in 2011 almost immediately spawned real-world markets for cosmetic items in the company’s various first-party games. Counter-Strike is certainly the biggest market on the platform, but Team Fortress 2 (TF2) also has dedicated collectors constantly searching for the rarest cosmetics to buy, sell and trade.
Last week, hat collector Vytal completed the biggest trade in Team Fortress 2 history (nice work, PC Gamer). The hat in question is a rare version of the Crone’s Dome, which itself is a fairly common drop. Vytal told PC Gamer that he bought the hat for “24,000 keys worth of items,” and “an undisclosed lump of cash.” Keys go for about $1.80 on third-party sites, meaning the deal was worth at least $43,200, plus whatever cash Vytal threw on top of the keys.
Sparkly Witch Hat
Vytal got a couple of other rare items in the trade, but the real prize is the aforementioned special Crone’s Dome. This particular hat has a lot going on, including a “Spellbound” classification that gels with the hat’s theme. Spellbound is possibly the rarest effect in the game, only being available for brief periods in 2014 and 2017. Spellbound is a visual effect that causes purple-coloured stars to continuously erupt from whatever item has the effect. It’s popular both because of its rarity and because of the aesthetically pleasing effect.
That’s not the extent of this particular Crone’s Dome’s unique modifiers, however. The hat also has two rare ‘spells’ attached. Spells are temporary modifiers available in Team Fortress 2 which change a visual element of an item, but they were only available in 2013 and 2014. The first spell is Spectral Spectrum which adds a team-coloured effect (i.e. differs depending on which team the player is on). The effect causes the item to constantly change colour in a pulsing motion.
The second spell is Headless Horseshoes. When this is applied to an item, it causes the wearer to leave flaming purple footprints behind them as they move. According to Vytal, this effect is rarer than Spectral Spectrum and adds significant value to a cosmetic. If a player had these spells and didn’t apply them, they were deleted from their inventories after 2015. However, cosmetics with these spells already attached were preserved. This means that unless Valve reintroduces these spells, these effects are limited in number and can never be recreated.
Lastly, there’s a bugged Killstreak Kit applied to the hat. These kits are intended to be applied to weapons to keep track of killstreaks, but Valve accidentally allowed them to be applied to any cosmetic for a single night following a patch. During this brief window, players were able to apply the kits to hats and other items before the bug was patched, adding another level of rarity.
It should also be noted that the Crone’s Dome is an all-class item, meaning Vytal can wear this extremely rare hat on every single character. This isn’t unique to this Crone’s Dome, but it’s still a nice bonus that adds value to the item.
All in all, a multitude of factors had to coalesce to create this specific Crone’s Dome, justifying the price tag.
Team Fortress 2 is a FPS from Valve with incredible longevity, remaining among the most-played games on Steam despite it being launched in 2007. Born from a Quake mod, it sees teams of characters do battle across several modes.