Provided you haven’t been living under a rock for the last 25 years, there is a chance that “Pokémon” has been screamed in your face at least once. Or check your phone. There are 150 million people that play Pokémon GO. Plop them in a nation together and you could have a little Indonesia. Pokémon makes a crud load of money. TV shows, video games, etc. However, a section (still pretty large) section of the franchise (which makes more money than Marvel or Star Wars) is the Trading Card Game. Surprisingly, these paper card games have an item of interest for coin collectors.

Pokémon trading card games have been out since 1999. Instead of hunting for wild Charizard, you hunted for the shadowless Charizard holo in base set packs (that card is worth about half a million and can fetch more at auction). The game works like this: you either buy pre-made 60-card decks or throw hundreds of dollars at 10-card boosters, which you can hopefully get a bunch of good basic cards, energy, and trainer boost cards. Once you have burned your money, grab another friend looking at his smoldering pile of cash, and battle the two decks to see who has the better deck. Some of these cards you will use in any game may have a randomizer. To cite the 2013 Legendary Treasures Victini, the card has the ability of Victory Star, an ability that allows it to ignore all coin flip effects and to reflip those coins.

What did I say? The randomizer is coins. Some can make an attack fail or succeed. Some will be forced to flip a coin whether to see if an attack will fail or not. This can often turn the tides of many battles.

The local currency was used for a few months, but players would complain to Pokémon that these would mark and damage cards.

Pokémon began to “mint” these coins, starting with a coin featuring Chansey, the Egg Pokémon. Chansey was featured on one side, a PokeBall on the other. These were plastic, light enough to avoid damaging the card, but heavy enough to be properly flipped with enough force to make the ball turn on its axis before landing on the table.

In tournaments, coins were used, but when some competitors realized some seemed rather, um, imbalanced. The front side (the one with the Pokémon) would have been etched in the coin’s surface to form the basic shape of that Pokémon. Some (like the previously mentioned Chansey) were relatively simple designs, with only one or two basic shapes etched into the coin. However, some (particularly Mewtwo, with the many design intricacies) required a large amount of plastic carved away from the coin. This created inconsistencies between coins, one could be fair, and one coin could have a head's side lighter than the other. This led to professional TCG (yes, people play this card game for money) players looking for alternatives, and most eventually decided on going for the dice, which was considered to be more impartial than the coin.

However, the stubborn company they were, Pokémon continues to make coins for decks, sells them as individual collectors’ items, and are still used at tournaments despite dice being the favorites amongst players. These are also awarded at tournaments for participants.

To this day, most sets and board games come with surplus coins. The online version of the game comes with coins, instead of dies. I don’t know why.

Now for the part I always do, how valuable are these?���������

If you buy a deck with a coin in it, the coin is worth about its weight in plastic, predicted at about 75 cents worth of plastic.

Some of the ones awarded at tournaments command a small premium on the market, a small sum of around $75.

However, an exclusive golden-chrome finish was used on a few limited-edition coins in the 1990s with the release of the TCG. These command a premium, and if still in packaging in mint condition, will command about $500 on the open market, possibly more.

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And there you have it. The Pokémon TCG coins are a niche collectible for some, and a hobby for others.�

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Guess the Song Lyrics: Last Time: Back In Black-AC/DC

In restless dreams, I walked alone

Narrow streets of cobblestone

'Neath the halo of a street lamp

I turned my collar to the cold and damp

When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light

That split the night