The 10 Rarest Pogs from the '90s

The year is 1927. A young girl with her collection of round, cardboard caps taken from milk bottles prepares to face off against her opponent in a game of Milk Caps. For the better part of a year, this girl has been saving her caps, hoping, praying even, that she will be able to defeat an opponent in a schoolyard showdown. Nobody knows the result of that fateful battle, but what is known about the conquest of this young woman, and other brave warriors like her, is that more than 60 years later, her little schoolyard game would go on to become a worldwide phenomenon known as Pogs.

The little girl, named Blossom Galbiso, grew up to become a teacher and counselor at an elementary school in Oahu, where she introduced the generation of ‘90s kids to the game that shaped her childhood.

The game spread like wildfire. Soon the Company that manufactured the caps (that were being sold as a promotional item with Passion Orange Guava juice, hence the name Pogs), were shipping millions of caps to Hawaii each week, and it would be a matter of time before the game reached the mainland.

Soon, you couldn’t go anywhere without finding Pogs, and small children were selling their souls to the devil in order to get their hands on some of the rarer caps. Reaching peak popularity in the mid ‘90s, Pogs came a long way from the plain cardboard milk caps that they once were. They now featured images from pop culture ranging anywhere from sports stars, to superheroes and television characters, and let's not forget the decade-appropriate holographic drawings. But sadly, the fad was not meant to last, and when the Pog bubble burst after about 3 years, there was so much oversaturation in the market that Pogs were left relatively worthless.

That said, there are a couple of milk caps that are hard to come by. We're not saying they'll hold their value over time, but you never know. Here are the 10 rarest Pogs from the '90s.

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Factory mess-ups like these weren't exactly commonplace, but due to market over-saturation during the height of the fad having one wouldn't exactly make you a millionaire. Regardless, having an "off-center" pog is pretty rare, and pogo collectors really judge the quality of a milkcap by how center the graphic is printed. Really, we can't make this up.

These were given away in 1994 as McDonald's Happy Meal Toys. The commercials were pretty amazing, but of course they were nowhere near as cool as the actual Power Rangers toys.

These milkcaps were sold in Nintendo Power's Summer 1995 Super Power Supplies Catalog. Apparently they were pizza scented and feature characters from the roleplaying game EarthBound. Though they were originally five dollars, a set sold on eBay in 2009 for $255.

There were two sets of Simpsons SkyCaps that came out in 1994 from SkyBox. One was a set of 20 on white cardboard depicting the famous cartoon family doing various things, and another numbered set of 50 depicting numerous characters from the show. Of all these, of course Bart Simpson was the rarest.

Culled from the POG Collectors Guide series of books published by Random House Books, these milk caps depict "Pogman," the official mascot of the World Pog Federation (yes, it was a thing) in different costumes. These came out between 1995-1996.

This is where it all started. In the late '70s Hawaii's Haleakala Dairy came out with its new Passion Orange Guava juice. Contrary to popular belief, the game didn't start out with the milkcap inserts on these beverages, as they were no longer widely-used at the time. Instead, the old-school milkcaps were made as a marketing and promotional item.

The "Launch Edition" of the Star Trek Stardiscs were released by Stardic Enterprise-Canada in 1994. The set of 60 pogo came on 30 unpunched cards. This gold-rimmed card featuring Scotty and McCoy were only found about once a box.

Released in 1995 and 1996, this soccer series by Merlin covered all the Premier League teams. Each set consisted of the club badge on a silver foiled background and 11 player pictures, but the full team sets are apparently harder to come by these days.

Prior to circulation in the early '90s, these two pogs were withdrawn. One of these, the "Wash & Brush Up" scene pog, is autographed by two women who were in that scene in the film — Dona Massin & Lois January.

Quite possibly the rarest set of pogs in existence, rumor is a couple of boxes got sent to just one store in Texas while the rest were destroyed. That's probably why this guy wants $750 for the complete set, which he went through the trouble of curating and making sure each milkcap was perfectly centered. Nostalgia has its price, we suppose.