BUYING GUIDEUPDATED JUL 2026
The torch corals worth chasing.
Torch corals are where a lot of reefers first pay real money for a name. A gold-tipped Euphyllia that sways in the flow, sold as a single head for more than a whole rack of zoa frags — that's the torch market. This is my short list of the ones worth knowing: what each name actually covers, and what it's been going for across the vendors I check.
Every price below is pulled live when you open the page — no figure I set once and left to rot. That matters more with torches than almost anything: the same name swings hundreds between shops and weeks, so a stale number would be worse than none. If a torch here isn't in stock anywhere, the page says exactly that.
The one that isn't a gold torch.
Most of the torches people chase are variations on a single gold coral — more on that below. The NY Knicks is the exception: a genuinely different animal, blue-and-orange where the others are gold, with a lineage clean enough that you mostly know what you're buying. The spread on it is wide but honest — a small single head and a settled show colony are both "a NY Knicks," and the price is mostly telling you which.
NY Knicks Torch
4 VENDORS$99–$29990 DAYS
$99.00
The gold torch, and the names it hides behind.
Here's the thing nobody tells you the first time you shop for a gold torch: a lot of the names are the same coral. Hellfire, Holy Grail, Indo Gold, 24k, Dragon Soul — reefers argue endlessly over which are distinct lineages and which are just a shop's label on the same import — even the torch ID guides can't fully settle it. I track them as separate names because that's how they're sold, but go in knowing the line between them is blurry, and don't pay a lineage premium for a distinction nobody can actually prove.
The Hellfire is one of that tangle — gold tentacles, pink-purple tips. It turns up at a handful of shops at a fixed price; the line below is the lowest of them right now.
Hellfire Torch
6 VENDORS$119–$29990 DAYS
$124.99
The Holy Grail is the one that's everywhere — as I write this, it's at more shops than any other torch on my list. Its range is enormous, because a small B-grade cutting and a fat, perfectly-colored show head are both sold as "Holy Grail Torch." The variant names you'll run into — Cotton Candy, Pink Tip, Radioactive — all get sold under the Holy Grail name with a morph label on top; whether any is genuinely its own coral is the same argument nobody here can settle. Read the whole range as a tier, not a price: the bottom of it is an entry cutting, the top is a show piece that costs more than plenty of full setups, and the price history tells you where today's number actually falls.
Holy Grail Torch
18 VENDORS$95–$75090 DAYS
$94.99
What I'd actually do.
Torches move, but not the way acros do — you usually have a little more time. So the play is calmer: pick the name you actually want, learn its range from the price history so you can tell a real deal from an ordinary week, and let the morning email surface it the day it lists instead of refreshing five tabs. If you're new to torches, the gold cluster is forgiving and a fine place to start; the four-figure show heads can wait until your parameters are boring.
Want that same live read on every coral type, not just torches? I keep one on what named corals cost. And when the one you want finally drops, how to actually buy it is the other half of the job.
There are torches I've left off — some on purpose, some because I haven't caught them trending yet. If there's one you're hunting that I'm not tracking, tell me. I add the corals people actually chase.