Short answer first: an account with UFO Corki sells for a median of
$46.87 on our shelf,
against $22.50 for the median League
account — and the skin is doing real work in that gap. That makes it the odd
one out among League's untouchable skins, and the reason is not the model. It is
the date.
The numbers, read from the live shelf as you open this page: there are
22 accounts with
UFO Corki among 2 045 League accounts,
priced from $4.25 to
$98.09. For comparison,
Judgment Kayle sits on
88 accounts
at a median of $40.18.
The live listings are on the UFO Corki accounts
shelf; the numbers above come from it and move as stock moves.
In January 2010, Riot gave UFO Corki to every account created before
14 January 2010, as a thank-you to the players who were there first. It was
never in the store, never came back, and cannot be earned any other way.
Plenty of skins can say something similar. What only UFO Corki says is when
the account was born. Judgment Kayle proves someone reached level 6 during
Season 1 — a bar low enough that several times as many accounts on our shelf
clear it. King Rammus proves closed-beta participation, which sounds rarer
still. UFO Corki proves the account physically existed before a calendar date
sixteen years ago, and no amount of later activity can fake that.
That is what buyers of collector accounts actually want: not a 2010 cosmetic —
the model is a relic and Corki has been visually reworked since — but a
verifiable birth date. The skin is the only part of an account's age that shows
up in the collection screen with an ownership state, which makes it the only
part a buyer can check before paying. "OG account" is a claim; UFO Corki is a
receipt.
Here is the strange part of the ledger. King Rammus should out-rank UFO Corki —
closed beta ended in October 2009, months before the Corki cutoff — yet the
median King Rammus account sells for
$21.49, right
around the catalogue median, on
59 listings.
The explanation is on the map:
| King Rammus accounts by server | listings | median |
|---|
| VN | 53 | $20.26 |
| SEA | 4 | $50.74 |
| BR | 1 | $57.75 |
| EUW | 1 | $150.55 |
Nearly every King Rammus account on our shelf sits on the Vietnam server, and
the handful outside it ask several times as much. Same badge, same year, the
difference is only where the account lives.
UFO Corki has the same geography, milder:
Veteran accounts survived in bulk where League's early player base was, and
supply keeps prices civil there. On Western servers the same skin is nearly
extinct — read any EUW or NA row as anecdote rather than as a median, because it
is a handful of listings at most, and a server missing from the table is missing
because there is nothing to put in it. A Western 2010 account is a different,
scarcer thing than the same badge in the region where everyone kept theirs.
If you are shopping deliberately: decide whether you are buying the badge or
the badge on your server, because the market prices them very differently. A
server is also the one thing you cannot change for free
after the fact.
Ask for the collection screen, not a loading screen. The skin must show in
the account's collection with an ownership state. A screenshot of Corki in a
game proves nothing.
Check what else the price is made of. The cheapest and dearest UFO Corki
listings on the shelf differ by an order of magnitude, and both carry the same
badge — the gap is the rest of the inventory: level, skin count, server. Price
the account first, then decide what the birth certificate is worth to you on
top.
Take the handover more seriously, not less. A pre-2010 account has sixteen
years of history: old emails, possibly a phone number, possibly an original
owner who can still prove first ownership to Riot. Rarity raises the stakes of
securing the account properly
— it never lowers them.
Lead with the date, because that is what the skin is. "Account created 2009,
UFO Corki as proof" reads stronger than a skin name buried in a list — the
buyer you want is searching for account age and needs to be told the badge
verifies it.
Then price the rest of the inventory honestly. The premium above the median is
earned by the proof of age; the rest of the asking price still has to be
explained by rank, skins and essence, the same as on
any other League account.
Every figure on this page is read from our live catalogue when the page loads,
not written into the text — the shelf moves, and so do the numbers. Per-skin
figures are the same ones the skin's own shelf page prints; the server tables
count only listings that state a server, and a slice this small can change shape
with a handful of sales, which is why each table prints its listing counts next
to the medians. The full picture of League's untouchable skins — including the
ones that turn out not to be — is in
the rarest League skins and what they cost.