Items to avoid investing in CS2 Pt.2

Interested in investing in Counter-Strike Skins? Throught this series I will explain why certain items shouldn't be considered as a better option, saving you some future troubles.

There are over twenty thousand items on the Counter-Strike Market and more to come. Still due to this influx of new updates, the market hasn't tanked and carries some good value in terms of market cap.

It is expectable that some items will have a worse perfomance than others, it is hard to predict which will rise faster, but there are always a few things to look out for.

READ THE FIRST PART

Stat-Trak Knives

Counter-Strike knives have been one of the most desirable items in the game. Still there are a few things that you should avoid when buying one. One of these things is: Stat-Trak versions of knives.

Comparing to other items, the design of the Stat-Trak Knives isn't so well made. In most cases the counter is just hidden, with poor readibility. The Stat-Trak doesn't feel organic in a knife and I think that the players in general don't care about it.

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When looking at a certain price for a knife, most players will opt-out of the stat-trak version. The price increase between the normal version and stat-trak doesn't justify and some times within the same price range you can get a better looking knife.

In the end its a no brainer. If you look through the market you will see that within the same price point, you can get a normal version knife, and worse knife but stattrak. My belief is that within this scenario everyone will go for the better looking item.

So from the point of an investor, it is better to have the normal version.

Souvenir Skins

On my last post about this topic, I spoke about avoiding niche patterns. I think that Souvenir skins fall onto the niche skins category. These skins are very limited, considering that they come from exclusive packages that were dropped on old majors, or bough through the new token system created by Valve.

What really drives the market for souvenir skins is just a few examples, like the Dragon Lore, Knight or the Master Piece. Still these are outliars and the value of the other skins of the collections mentioned will have a value accordingly to their red items.

This means that if the interest of high tier skin collectors falls, due to a new collection or something else, the skins for that collection might fall aswell. It is better to have items where the interest of the majority of the community is to have it as a Play-Skin, otherwise if its value is tightly coupled to other details, the value could take a hit.

Still, is it bad to have a couple of souvenirs from a Cobblestone or Overpass collection? I don't think so, but this doesn't mean that the rest of the collections will also go the same direction. So when buying Souvenirs, it is good to evaluate if the top items of the collection are established within the community.

Conclusion

The type of items mentioned in these articles are, by no mean, to completly avoid. Mostly because it is impossible to predict if the community will adopt more of item X or Y. It is good to reinforce the idea, that by investing in certain items, you could get stable results.

If you just start buying items left and right, for no reason, then it is most likely that you will end up losing money. You could also get lucky and a souvenir just goes to the moon, but then again if you are waiting to be lucky, that is not investing but gambling.

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