A $65 Cuban in a Humidor Inside a Humidor: The El Rey del Mundo Tico Arrives Sept. 28

On September 28, 2026, Costa Rica gets its third Cuban Regional Edition ever, and the brand behind it is a deliberate choice. The El Rey del Mundo Tico celebrates fifteen years of the country's Habanos distributor, Cruz Canela and Trust G.B., and it arrives in the kind of packaging that makes the box itself a collectible: a numbered cabinet of fifteen cigars slipped inside a glossy white desktop humidor developed by HumidifGroup. It is a box within a box, priced accordingly at roughly $980 per unit, or about $65.33 a cigar.

The cigar itself measures 5 9/10 inches by 54 ring gauge, a factory format known as Geniales. Production is capped at 6,000 individually numbered slide-lid boxes, and beyond them, 15 special Master Piece humidors will be produced, each holding two boxes of cigars. A launch party is scheduled for November 13 at the TEK Cruz Canela store in San Jose. Every cigar carries the standard El Rey del Mundo band plus a special 15 Aniversario Cruz Canela Regional Edition band marking the occasion.

The brand choice tells the deeper story. El Rey del Mundo was once made in many sizes; today it survives with only two regular-production vitolas, the Choix Supreme and the Demi Tasse. Habanos has repositioned the marque almost entirely as a vehicle for specialty projects: Casa del Habano exclusives, anniversary humidors, and Regional Editions like this one. Where once it was a flagship, it is now a canvas. Costa Rica's two previous Regionals, the Ramon Allones Nuevo Mundo from 2017 and the Saint Luis Rey Pura Vida from 2020, followed the same pattern of quiet-brand, limited-count releases built for the local market.

The pricing is the part worth sitting with. At $65 a cigar, the Tico sits well above what most Cuban Regional Editions cost at launch, continuing a slow upward creep across the program. But the package explains some of it: a HumidifGroup desktop humidor as standard packaging for a 15-count cabinet is not normal production economics. Whether the contents justify the price is a question only smokers in San Jose can answer after September 28, because the cigars will be available only in Costa Rica. For collectors elsewhere, the Master Piece humidors will be the ones that surface at auction. For everyone else, the Tico is a reminder that Regional Editions have become less about access and more about ceremony: a humidor, an anniversary, a number on the box, and a brand kept alive precisely because it is small enough to make the ceremony feel rare.