de_epdive | The Biggest Shift In CS Market History (E1)

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]For almost the entire time in which Counter Strike skins existed, the supply of those skins has been governed by one particular god, randomness. You open your case, the game rolls its many different sided dice to decide your pattern, float, gun, rarity, the list goes on, and whatever comes out enters the economy whether you want it or not.

[00:00:23]Sometimes it's good, but let's be honest, most of the time it's not.

[00:00:26]Either way, whether you want it or not, it now exists. A terrible blue and some random middling float in the middle of battle scard skins with sometimes the visual appeal worse than the vanilla counterpart. The case system simply doesn't care. The item is created, the economy prices that in, and in a way, even if you get rid of it by Counterstrike's means, it still lives on forever in a way. And for such a sophisticated and masterly crafted digital economy, a random system prone to over supply is maybe not the best way in which to introduce items, or at least not all of them. Which is why I think the terminals were introduced in the active drop pools. And that's because terminals change one very small but extremely important detail.

[00:01:16]They let you say no. And allowing players to say no changes the entire supply chain of the collection. While the offers drop in the same rate as cases do, the rates no longer precede supply. The rates simply just make offers. The players, you you're deciding which offers deserve to become real and which ones deserve to go back into the void in which they came. So, while the drop rates are random, the terminal supply is distinctly not random. It is filtered by demand, by price, by taste, by impatience, and by the simple human instinct to look at an M249 and think, "No, I'd rather actually have nothing."

[00:01:55]And I've pulled the data from the databases in which are available to us.

[00:01:59]And the instinct to decline, the instinct to forego offers that aren't profitable or aren't enjoyable to the player or consumer looking at it. It has erased a ton of skins that would have been in the market that would have been driving down prices and it creates a very interesting future landscape for the terminal collections and any subsequent terminal collections in Counterstrike 2. And that's because we need to change our mental models here.

[00:02:26]The terminal is not a case. It lives somewhere between a collection and a case and it tries to mask itself as one.

[00:02:33]But it is very very different. Now, to understand why terminals are strange, we have to start with cases. Because while they're not the same whatsoever, they will help us understand exactly where our logic is coming from. You buy your case, you buy your key, and open it, and you receive whatever the randomly generated number generates for you.

[00:02:53]There's no negotiation or strategy involved. You just simply get what you get. It rolls and rolls and rolls, stops on a gun, and that gun is now in the game forever. And it's a reality that a lot of people tend to ignore, but we've become so used to it, so conditioned to it that it's basically the foundation of the economy. Every case opening creates an item. It creates a uniform distribution of items across all rarity tiers. It creates uniform float values across all float ranges. And that happens too within the terminal, but only in your offer sheet, not in what actually manifests within the market. In the case system, good skins enter supply. bad ones also enter supply.

[00:03:35]Every single factory new red unboxed, every single battle scard blue unboxed.

[00:03:40]The market gets all of it and the market has to deal with all of it. So, in a way, it's a little bit outdated. The case doesn't care whether your skin is wanted, useful, beautiful, tradable, whatever it may be. But when player counts become high and supply is simply overwhelming, things need to change.

[00:03:57]Because cases used fixed rarity odds, which each rarity being five times more rare than the one preceding it, the supply creates exactly a pyramid in terms of manifested skins. Blues pile up at the bottom at 80%, purples sit above them at 16% and pinks or classified is where it really starts to thin out. And it doesn't happen over one opening or 100 openings. But when you open 30 million cases, such as the fever case in the armory, the table exactly reveals a pyramid. And that pyramid is what drives the trade-up system that is oh so popular within the game. Now, in most games, a terrible looking skin would simply be used by no one, but take up space in everyone's inventory. But in CS2, cheap skins do still matter because even if your skin is terrible or on a gun you never use, they can still be classified as material. The building blocks for the next rarity up, the trade-up contract. As we know, or if you're not privy, a trade-up contract, you take 10 skins, you put them in, you get one skin from a rarity tier above it in the collection in which your inputs were inputed. This guides a lot of the economy and a lot of the prices of these skins for even if a M249 is completely undesirable. If it trades up to a nice skin, it will have to take some value because it is essentially one/10enth of your AK above it. So, a blue is not just a blue. It's one/tenth of a purple. It's 100th of a pink. And it's 1,000th of a red. It may be ugly now, but it has the potential to be something that someone may care about someday.

[00:05:37]And when the low tier supply is abundant, like the case system encourages, trade-ups become easier.

[00:05:42]When low tier supply dries up, trade-ups become expensive. And we could see that in older collections. And when trade-ups become expensive, sometimes too expensive, the higher tier supply stops growing, sometimes completely. Take a look at the rising sun collection.

[00:05:58]There's only one pink, the AK hydroponic, and only one red, the AUG Akiabra. And when your AK is more expensive than the AUG, you've basically stopped supply from coming in. So that's why the bottom of your collection matters. So if your terminal system is quietly and sneakily removing the low tier skins before they even manifest within the market, it's not just affecting your 5-cent garbage market.

[00:06:21]It's affecting the red market, the pink market, and the glove market. and terminals, whether by design or a oversight by Valve, has made the bottom somewhat disappear. So, now we can touch on terminals. At first glance, the terminals seem familiar and don't seem to raise too many red flags. You activate the terminal, the arms dealer shows you your item, shows you your float, and the price in which you'll have to pay to receive it. It feels case adjacent, which is why so many people compare the two. But the simple fact that there is a offering system completely changes the game. The case is giving you your item while the terminal is giving you an offer. Not all skins cost $2.50 across the board. Rarity and price is determined by demand, not by your odds of getting one. Because if you decline and that terminal disappears, that's one week of XP gone and no skins enter the market. It doesn't become a trade-up filler. It doesn't sit on Steam on the listings page for months at a time. It simply ceases to exist. So everything but basically the drop rates.

[00:07:28]Terminals don't really function like cases at all. And it's hard to tell which one is better at the moment. Cases create forced supply and terminals create optional supply. And optional supply is going to behave differently because people behave differently once you give them a choice. They're not going to redeem every offer. They're going to redeem the ones that only really make sense for them. they're in the market for a nice M4 skin, well then they're probably going to redeem the M4 skin, even if it's at a loss. Even if they don't want an M4 skin, if it has a nice float or a cool pattern, they may get that one as well. But if it doesn't pose any use to them, right, they can't use it in a tradeup. They can't play with it, then they're just going to decline it, which means that the market isn't receiving the amount of skins it is used to. It's only receiving the ones in which people want. And you could tell as soon as you look at the supply numbers. Now, as I'm sure you're aware, but if you're not, there's one piece that we'll have to go over before we get into it. Float values. Now, every skin has a wear in Counter-Strike. Factory new, minimal wear, but each of those has a float number tied to it. The lower the number, the better it looks, is what you essentially need to know. And the range can be anywhere from 0 to 1. Every skin within the dead hand terminal is 0 to one. And float values are the number in which you need to use in order to make smart and informed decisions when doing trade-ups. But trade-ups don't care about factory new minimal wear labels.

[00:08:54]They care about the number underlying each and every float value in your inputs. And in the current system, the float outcomes have been normalized, making 3% of every skin, no matter what the float range is, eligible to become a factory new skin. Obviously, the most desirable skins within the game. Aren't you tired of sitting around waiting for the next CS2 Armory update? Well, why sit when you can stand? With the new E6G Cyberex gaming desk from Flexispot, enjoy your computer to the max with the new gold standard of gaming desks in the industry. Adjust your height exactly to your liking with the new lift control feature inspired by gamers for gamers.

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[00:10:11]For the E6G has secure and fastm moving dual motor systems. And when you pair that with the three section legs on either side of the table, the only tilting that'll be going on is in the game. A headphone hook, a cup holder, a cable management desk. What else could you possibly need? That's right, nothing. From precise control to carbon fiber grade strength, the Cyber Xes will truly redefine your game room into a command center. Check out the link in the top right of the screen right now or in the description for more details. And thank you very much to the wonderful ladies and gentlemen at Flexispot. I appreciate your support and your continued effort to put out top tier gaming, office, and lifestyle furniture for everyone. So for a 0ero to one float ranged skin, the factory new skins or 3% of the dropped skins land in that premium sector that carries value not only for aesthetic purposes but for the trade-up system to move up one after that. So if a terminal behaves like a case and if every offer became supply immediately, you can expect 3% of every skin to be factory new. But the terminal data shows something obviously very different. Now, every single terminal skin I looked at was above that 3% threshold. The lower tier skins, factory new, made up a larger proportion of them. The USP around 9% of each instance in the market right now was around factory new. The highest of which was the MP7 Amber line. And this number should raise some eyebrows because as we've established, the USP and the MP7 don't drop at a 10% factory new rate.

[00:11:56]They drop and are offered 3% of the time. Yet 10% of them are factory new.

[00:12:02]So a factory new is making up a larger percentage of your redeemed supply.

[00:12:06]People are declining at a pretty decently high rate higher float offers and subsequently total supply. So, it's not that factory new skins are flooding in. It's that the ugly stuff, the high float stuff is disappearing. Battle scard offers, field tested offers, bad patterns, bad prices, they're being shown to players and people are not accepting them. So, the factory new percentage as a proportion of total skins is not rising because factory new is easier. It's the same. It's just as hard. It's just that the other ones simply aren't being accepted. And it doesn't matter now when the skin is actively dropped and prices are still trending downwards, but it could mean very interesting price action for the collection as a whole in the future. Now I understand that float and their database had issues when terminals first launched and the public data is you know maybe not as perfect as it could be but it is useful and it is one of the only ways in which we can see supply numbers in this way because even if one skin is off I'm sure all of the other skins are off in the same proportion. So, we can at least use the percentages and relative amounts to one another to make a very educated analysis of what we're seeing here. Now, back to the MP7.

[00:13:25]Around 10% of all instances of the MP7 is factory new. Again, that doesn't mean MP7s are dropping at 10% in factory new.

[00:13:33]It means that 10% of all MP7s accepted are factory new. People are opting for better looking MP7s than ones that aren't as good-looking. And honestly, that makes sense. The Amberline is a greatl looking play skin. And the MP7 has gained a large amount of attention due to its buffs in January. The skin itself wears terribly and it's pattern dependent. So a field tested one that doesn't have a great pattern, you may simply forego a factory new one and an all-white pattern. Now that's going to draw some attention. It's not my opinion. Rather, it's the seemingly popular one that people are letting their bad offers go to the wind. And the thing is when people are selecting their supply is that it doesn't enter rationally. It doesn't enter at the rate in which Valve set with their previous cases. Instead, supply enters poorly or selfishly. And here is the biggest number that shows just how many terminals are being wasted and thrown away into the wind, keeping supply of this collection super low considering how many people play the game in the year 2026. We could take a look at two blues, right? Blues cannot be traded up to, so there isn't any supply differences there. And they're part of the same collection. So, we know that the offers at the very least were roughly the same. Despite the same amount of offers, the USP Silent Shot sits at around 318,000 total supply. The M249 only around 99,000. So, that is a gap of more than 200,000 skins. Now, we have to be careful here, which I know is annoying, but it's necessary. So, some skins are simply just entering supply dramatically less than others, even though they share the same rarity, they share the same exact fundamentals, it's just now that the players are choosing. And this is a pretty economically important finding.

[00:15:28]And while the USP is the most redeemed blue within the collection, we can assume at least some USPS were declined as well. But since we can't really put a number on that, we know that at least 200,000 M249s were declined. around 200,000 UMPPS were declined, around 150,000 57s were declined. But even if we just look at the M249, already 2 months into the terminal's life cycle, 200,000 blues aren't here that should be here, which is 20,000 fewer purples, 2,000 fewer pinks, 200 fewer reds, 40 fewer gloves. And that's from one gun.

[00:16:06]That doesn't have to do with the other blues. That doesn't have to do with the purples that were declined. That doesn't have to do with the pinks that were declined. That doesn't have to do with the reds that were declined or the gloves that were declined. And that pyramid we were talking about that exists within every case and every collection we've ever seen in the game is being picked apart by the human brain, the economical brain. Cases never allowed this. The bad blue still entered the game. They would get dumped into inventories. They would be three cents for a long, long time. But over time, as trade-ups happened and supply decreased, prices eventually started to move. But in the terminal system, bad blues can simply vanish and not exist. And that's why we cannot analyze the supplies of cases and terminals in the same manner.

[00:16:49]As soon as your distribution system goes from purely RNG to RNG plus consent, you're going to start to bend your will a little bit towards demand. Skins people want are going to get redeemed.

[00:17:03]Sometimes skins are too good to pass up, like a super low float M249. Even if you don't use the skin, you could probably sell it for quite a bit of money. You're going to purchase that. But most of the time, the things that you don't want are going to get declined. Clean floats survive. Play skins survive. The ugly stuff goes away forever. So, it's not how many players are playing the game, which determines how many skins are entering the game. What actually is happening is what players are willing to pay to bring into existence, and what they aren't will stay forever in the void. The easiest explanation for terminal declines is also the most boring, which means it's probably doing most of the work. And sometimes that is just that it makes no financial sense.

[00:17:45]Sometimes the terminal will offer you a $3 M4, but when you look on the market, it's $1.50. Now, why would you rationally pay $3 just to have a $1.50 resale value? You're losing $1.50 just by redeeming it. That's the first major difference between the case and the terminal. the case, you pay 250 flat for everything, no matter what. And that's because you only see the offer after you pay. Here, you pay for the thing you're looking at. It gives you just a little bit more time to gain consciousness before making your decision. And those few short seconds of your decision-making changes the supply incredibly. As you could see by the data, the other players decline is simpler and a little bit more damaging in a way because it's much more prevalent, and it's just that people don't want the skin. battle scarred, wellworn P90, M249, whatever it is, everything about the gun is simply off-putting to the buyer. And that's where we run into our first economic problem or the free rider problem.

[00:18:45]That's the name for this type of behavior because it is the phenomenon making this supply look the way in which it does. The market benefits when there is a lot of supply of an item. Things usually get cheaper, more affordable, more accessible. Everyone wants liquidity. Everyone wants trade-up fillers. Everyone wants enough items in circulation for prices to make sense, right? That's the collective good. But creating that supply individually can be irrational. Why would I help increase the supply if, as we just mentioned, my $3 M4 offer is only $1.50 on the market?

[00:19:20]Why would I redeem that? If I redeem a bad offer at a loss, the market gains one item, the market gains relative good, but I'm the idiot who just paid $1.50 50 extra for a skin I could have bought for a $1.50 elsewhere. Everyone gets to enjoy the fruits of my labor and I eat the cost and gain no benefit. So, the rational move is to simply decline.

[00:19:42]Hope someone else is stupid enough to not look at the market price and just simply redeem because they think the skin looks cool. But when enough people start to think that way, the system reaches a very ugly conclusion. Everyone wants the supply to exist, but nobody wants to pay for the supply. So the supply doesn't exist. So it's not that people are irrational, it's that they're too rational. They're looking at bad offers and making the correct decision.

[00:20:08]But when enough players are making the correct decision, the collective decision is wrong. And because declining bad offers make sense, terminal collections are going to end up much thinner, probably by design due to the high player counts and instances of bots, much thinner than their drop rates are going to imply. And terminals do their best to work around this. They filter they filter supply over time. As prices go down, people buy on the market instead of the terminal. So the terminal prices go down. People buy the now down terminal prices. And since people were buying all the listings on the market, those prices are relatively high.

[00:20:46]Therefore, you redeem from the terminal, prices go back up, market prices go back down, and the cycle continues. So they're a little bit more responding.

[00:20:54]Cases don't care if your item's worthless. They don't care if there's too many of them. If there's 7 million M249s in existence, if people keep opening cases, the supply keeps coming.

[00:21:03]Simple as that. Terminals are different.

[00:21:06]They respond. They don't respond intelligently. They're still actively dropped. So, you're going to trend downwards in price no matter what. If you buy something right now, odds are a month from now it'll be lower than what it is when you bought it. But, it does a better job in cases for sure at at least keeping prices relatively stable. And trade-ups are where this really starts to become a problem because again high tier items are not only created by direct offers. They're also created by consuming lower tier items. If your lower tier items are thinner than you expect, then the trade-up path becomes much more expensive. This matters most for terminal collections because the cheap filler is not guaranteed to exist at all like case volume. In a case economy, enough bad low tier skins eventually pile up because every opening creates one, and the market may hate them, but hatred is not the same as absence. They're still there, rotting, but usefully rotting at the bottom until someone finds a use for them. In the terminal economy, that pile is much, much smaller because every unwanted offer has to survive the player's decision-making and most importantly has to survive the player's wallet. So when people look at the terminal collections and assume the supply pyramid will start to take shape, you're missing the point.

[00:22:16]The pyramid is not being built by drop rates, it's being built by redemptions.

[00:22:20]And if redemptions are selective, then the pyramid is no longer a pyramid. And that's going to change how we do trade-ups in CS2. If factory-new low tier supply is disproportionately redeemed, but lower rougher looking blue tier skins are declined more frequently, then the market may end up with a strange imbalance of cleaner items with a higher share of redeemed supply, trade-up inputs expensive. It can make bad trade-up inputs scarce in their own stupid way. And it makes higher tier outputs more hard to manufacture because, and it's not because the odds of rolling them changed in the terminal.

[00:22:53]It's because everything below it is being filtered out. Skins.com is the newest sponsor on our channel. They have just released a P2P trading platform looking to compete with the best players in the space. If you don't want to wait that long, they do have an Instasell feature on the site in which the rates are the best I've seen just straight up.

[00:23:11]When the market is down, everything is on sale. And with the deals you're getting on skins.com, you could start your position basically up 20 to 25%.

[00:23:19]Try out skins.com and be a part of the future of CS2 skin trading. I will have a code soon, so stay tuned for that. The decline button doesn't get rid of one skin. It gets rid of one skin plus onetenth of the skin above it, 1/100th of the skin above it, and 1 1,000th of the skin above that. And then we get to gloves. And gloves we'll do in episode two because obviously that is quite a bit of subject matter to go over here and it definitely deserves its own. So terminals are not just cases. there not a workaround for Valve to kind of skirt around the loophole. I think it is a very intentional system independent of any scrutiny they received because supply is becoming a problem here. As more players play the game, whether they're real or not, they are going to add supply to the market. And if Valve doesn't have a way in which supply doesn't manifest, then simply every single skin is going to be 3 cents over time. And the long-term implications might be very strange. So, I'm not saying to go out and buy terminals today, right? They realistically have another two 2 and 1/2 years to exist within the active drop pools. But I am interested to see how this plays out two, three, four, five years from now.

[00:24:35]We'll have to wait and see. Until then, peace.