A mere year after Team Fortress 2 players set a new record for a single hat trade, with an absurdly rare Crone's Dome going for approximately $18,000 worth of keys, those crazy cats are at it again. "Good start to 2025" says Team Fortress 2 player and hat aficionado Vytal."Biggest trade in TF2 history."
Vytal is the buyer, and tells PC Gamer that the trade in question was for a total of around 24,000 keys' worth of items plus an "undisclosed lump of cash." TF2 keys currently go for $2.18 on Steam so hang on to your hats: That's $52,320 worth of keys. To be fair, however, we should probably price it to the value of keys on somewhere like marketplace.tf, which are typically around $1.80: So a mere $43,200. Plus cash.
The trade is a bundle that contains some truly exceptional items, and in particular a one-of-a-kind Crone's Dome: A witch's hat that is one of the most sought-after in the game. Vytal says most of the valuation comes down to this Crone's Dome being "the best hat in the game" and the effect here (Spellbound) being "thematically the most fitting for the Crone's Dome cosmetically and by namesake." Spellbound itself is super-rare and arguably the most expensive effect in the game, unavailable since 2014 barring a brief reintroduction in 2017.
But wait, this hat has even more. "It has special augments called 'spells' tagged to it," says Vytal, "these were only available in 2013 and 2014 and were removed from the game sometime in 2015." The hat has two spells, Spectral Spectrum ("adds a decent bit of value but not overly much") and Headless Horseshoes ("this one adds quite a bit"). The latter is "generally considered the best spell in the game and on top of that, its color matches the Spellbound effect and the general witch theme."
It also means the hat is constantly shifting hues, which is nice:
There is, believe it or not, even more to this hat. "Halloween Spells were discontinued after Halloween 2013 and any unapplied spells were deleted from players' backpacks," TF2 Youtuber and trader Pyrojoe tells PC Gamer. "Meaning the already-applied spells onto cosmetics added a really cool level of rarity that can not be replicated.
"It also has a glitched Killstreak Kit applied to it. This Killstreak Kit is meant to be applied to weapons to keep track of your killstreak during a game, granting a number that appears in the killfeed when playing. These Killstreak Kits of course are designed to be applied to weapons but there was a brief period where Valve accidentally made 'Universal Killstreak Kits' due to a bug after releasing an update, meaning the kits could be applied to cosmetics too. This bug only lasted for a night but people were quick to snatch up these universal killstreak kits and apply them to their favourite hats and miscs."
In other words, an additional layer of rarity that cosmetics just shouldn't have. Taken together, all of these factors make this Crone's Dome "the absolute best hat you can get in the game," says Vytal, "so that prestige in itself also adds a bit of value." The trade doesn't just make this particular Crone's Dome the most expensive hat in the game but the single most-expensive item ever traded in TF2 history.
"It in theory can never be unboxed again and hasn't been able to be obtained in over 10 years," explains Pyrojoe. "To get such a rare, desirable visually pleasing effect on an all-class hat was incredibly difficult because of the near infinite combinations that could be unboxed from the crate during that [availability] period. There were two Crone's Domes unboxed with Spellbound during this entire period. However the one Vytal picked up is even rarer than the other Spellbound Crone's Dome due to the additional attributes it has."
This Crone's Dome is not the sole item in the trade, but the others are adding a couple of hundred keys to the total at best. There are some similarities to last year's Crone's Dome sale, which had an Arcana effect instead of Spellbound, but this is for over double the price, which Vytal puts down to "a combination of the TF2 market picking up a lot after Valve has banned the bots plaguing the game for a while."
Within TF2, this is a unique item that can never be replicated and, in any kind of collector's market, such one-offs are where the real money lies. I ask Vytal about summarising this kind of sale, and you really couldn't encapsulate TF2's hat-fancying community and marketplace better than this:
"It basically boils down to: Witch sparkles on a witch hat, everyone likes witch sparkles and witch hat independently; Put together, it becomes the most themed and expensive item in the game."
