No matter how desperate you are for your own shiny pokémon, it’s probably not a good idea to give real money to eBay sellers for one.

Do you think when Game Freak came up with the idea of trading in its Pokémon games, it ever expected players to demand real world money for their pocket monsters?

We’ve seen Pokémon fans hoard rare trading cards, to scalp for far more than they’re worth, and one fan spent nearly $88,000 (just over £67,000) on a Cheeto that happened to resemble Charizard.

So, it’s not at all surprising that eBay would be filled with listings for particularly rare and elusive pokémon from the actual video games, especially shiny pokémon.

As a reminder, shiny pokémon just boast a different colour than usual, so there’s no real gameplay benefit to them, but they have always been incredibly difficult to find across all the games and are thus popular amongst ardent collectors.

The odds of encountering a shiny in the wild are 1/4,096 and while there is an item that improves those odds, it typically requires catching one of every pokémon in whichever game you’re playing, and even then the chances of finding a shiny are still only 1/1,365.

It’s no wonder then that some players sensed a money-making opportunity and are offering their own shiny pokémon in exchange for a fee. Although given how much effort is required to find one, these sellers most likely are using hacks to easily farm for shinies.

Whatever the case, there’s an abundant market of shiny pokémon for Pokémon Legends: Z-A (the newest game in the series) over on eBay, with prices fluctuating depending on what’s being offered.

And these are the affordable options (eBay)

For instance, one person is offering shiny variants of every alpha pokémon (which are larger and have better stats) in the game for just £1.17 each.

By comparison, someone else is selling an entire collection of shinies for $300, which is equivalent to £229. That’s just under four times as much as a Switch 2 copy of Pokémon Legends: Z-A costs.

And yet that almost seems reasonable once you switch games. Things are even worse for mobile game Pokémon Go, where the most expensive listing is a shiny Galarian Articuno for over £10,000. Surely, no pokémon is worth that much, no matter how rare it is.

Pokémon Go’s shinies likely fetch a higher price because of how much more difficult it is to encounter certain pokémon. For as rare as shinies are in the console games, every pokémon is readily available as long as you know where to look.

One of the big selling points of Pokémon Go, though, is that it uses the environment around you to determine what pokémon will appear. So, for example, if you don’t live near any bodies of water, water types are much harder to come by.

Not to mention some pokémon have only ever been made available for a limited time, such as this shiny Pichu with a Santa hat for £516 or this nearly £670 shiny Snorlax that’s wearing a night cap.

Even the trading card game has shinies (The Pokémon Company)

Email gamecentral@metro.co.uk, leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter.

To submit Inbox letters and Reader’s Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here.

For more stories like this, check our Gaming page.