CS2 Guides
Long-form reference guides on the things that decide what your CS2 inventory is actually worth — how prices are set, where to trade, and what historically holds value.
CS2 Cases & Drop Pool — every case, every odds, and how the supply works
CS2 weapon cases are the supply mechanism that produces almost every skin in the game. Fifty-two cases shipped, ~5,000 weapons across them, five drop tiers with fixed odds since 2017, a 0.26% gold rate, a 15% Steam fee on every sale, and a market that prices cases against their drop pool months before they leave the active rotation. This pillar explains the whole system end to end.
Read the guide →The Complete Guide to CS2 Inventory Valuation
Every part of a CS2 skin's price has a separate driver — float, pattern, stickers, StatTrak, marketplace. This guide breaks each one down with worked examples, then shows how the pieces combine to produce the price you actually see in your inventory.
Read the guide →The CS2 Items Encyclopedia — every category, axis, and how it ranks in price
The CS2 catalogue is a tree, not a flat list. Twelve weapon categories, roughly 190 weapons, several thousand skins, and a parallel set of axes — finish family, rarity tier, color, budget — that the market actually shops on. This pillar explains how the encyclopedia is built, how to navigate it, and what each axis tells you about price.
Read the guide →Where to Buy and Sell CS2 Skins (2026 Marketplace Guide)
Every CS2 marketplace charges a different fee, pays out in a different currency, takes a different stance on disputes, and rewards a different style of trading. This guide compares the eight platforms most CS2 traders actually use in 2026, then walks through which to choose for buying, selling, and high-value trades.
Read the guide →CS2 Patterns, Floats & Wear — the full mechanic, the price impact, the lookups
Every CS2 skin carries two numbers Valve writes at drop and never changes: a float (wear coordinate, 0.000–1.000) and a pattern index (paint seed, 0–1000). The float decides the exterior bucket and, on collector items, a meaningful slice of the price. The pattern decides nothing on most skins and decides everything on a short list of famous finishes — Case Hardened, Fade, Doppler, Marble Fade, Crimson Web. This pillar maps both, end to end, with the per-skin clips, the price math, and the tools that read each number off an inspect link.
Read the guide →CS2 Skin Investing & Trading Strategies (2026 Reference)
CS2 skins behave like a mix of digital collectibles, gaming peripherals, and a thin secondary market — and that combination produces prices that surprise both casual players and finance crowds. This guide walks through what has historically held value in CS2 skins, what flips quickly, how to size and risk-manage positions, and where the public data lets you cross-check claims.
Read the guide →CS2 Stickers & Capsules — the finishes, the supply, the crafts, and the money
A CS2 sticker is a tiny image you stick on a weapon — and also one of the deepest asset classes in the game. Four finishes (paper, foil, holo, gold), a supply set by capsules that are mostly never re-issued, a hard split between unapplied (tradeable) and applied (stuck forever), an irreversible scraping mechanic, and a collector market where a single Katowice 2014 holo outsells most knives. This pillar maps the whole system: the finishes and their value ladder, where every sticker comes from, how placement and scraping change a craft, and how the capsule economy turned a one-dollar 2014 purchase into a five-figure asset.
Read the guide →CS2 Trade-Up Contracts — the full mechanic, the float math, the EV
A CS2 trade-up contract takes ten skins of the same rarity and returns one skin from the rarity above. The mechanic is fully deterministic on the math side — the collection weight decides the output pool, the float average decides the output float, and the EV per contract is a sum you can compute on a napkin. This pillar explains every layer end to end, from the input rules to the knife two-step that turns 100 Covert rifles into a knife you can actually price.
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