There are dozens of various cases in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive — and even more collections! But what are they anyway? And why categorize skins this way? CS.MONEY is here to explain everything.
“Discontinued” Collections
Every skin in the game belongs to one of the collections. There are a total of 29 collections in the game. The skins from these collections can be obtained in a number of ways.
The oldest collection, Alpha, is already “out of the game.” Skins from it don’t drop and can’t be obtained from a case — you can only buy them from someone. The same is true for The Blacksite Collection, which, interestingly, has only one skin, MP5-SD Lab Rats.
Inactive Collections
Collections like The Rising Sun or The Cobblestone are also virtually leaving the game now. However, the skins from these collections can be purchased from us. For some inactive collections, an alternative way of obtaining the skins would be opening a case.
For example, you can get a skin from The Mirage collection by opening the Berlin 2019 Mirage Souvenir Package. This case costs about 7 bucks and doesn’t require a key.
There are a total of sixteen “inactive collections.” These are:
- The Assault Collection
- The Aztec Collection
- The Baggage Collection
- The Cache Collection
- The Chop Shop Collection
- The Cobblestone Collection
- The Dust Collection
- The Gods and Monsters Collection
- The Inferno Collection
- The Militia Collection
- The Mirage Collection
- The Nuke Collection
- The Office Collection
- The Overpass Collection
- The Rising Sun Collection
- The Vertigo Collection
Weekly Drop
Enough about the antiquities — let’s move on to more recent and interesting things. There are eight active collections in the game right now. These are the sets of skins that you can get “free.” This means there’s a chance to get one of the skins at the end of every match! Cool, right?
For active collections, all the methods of obtaining mentioned above are valid as well. You can buy them from our website, trade them with another player, or grab them from a case if you have one.
Now, let’s take a separate look at The 2018 Nuke Collection and The 2018 Inferno Collection. These are “updated” versions of The Nuke Collection and The Inferno Collection. The skins from these four collections belong to different cases and don’t overlap!
The list of the active collections is as follows:
- The 2018 Inferno Collection
- The 2018 Nuke Collection
- The Bank Collection
- The Dust 2 Collection
- The Italy Collection
- The Lake Collection
- The Safehouse Collection
- The Train Collection
Exclusive Collections
There are three collections left to talk about, namely The Canals Collection, The Norse Collection, and The St. Marc Collection. They have one thing in common: they are exclusive. While skins from these collections are available in regular drops, there are limitations.
First and foremost, the drop of these skins is limited in time. All three collections were only on the drop list at the time of Operation Shattered Web. Now that the operation has been over for quite a while, they are no longer part of that list. Simply put, they no longer drop for players to grab after the match.
But even when they were dropped, there was a second limitation in force. Skins from The Canals, The Norse, and The St. Marc collections were only available to combat pass holders.
These two factors render the rarest skins from these collections extraordinarily expensive. For example, AK-47 Wild Lotus from The St. Marc collection costs at least a thousand dollars! This is the most expensive AK skin, its price formed by the low and limited number of items in the game.
We told you about these three collections separately because chronologically, they appeared in the game later than the others. Now they are inactive collections too. Previous exclusive collections include the likes of The Gods and Monsters and The Rising Sun.
Crafting
There’s another significant thing about collections that we need to mention. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has a crafting system. It allows you to “swap” ten skins of the same rarity for one more rare ski, with the result completely dependent on the original skins. They determine the float value, whether the skin features StatTrak technology, and which specific skin you’ll get.
The fact is, exchanging ten skins of the same rarity from one collection always results in a skin from this collection. If the skin collections are different, the final skin will be determined randomly from the available collections.
This property is often used when crafting rare skins. For example, to create Desert Eagle Blaze, instead of taking a dozen Sawed-Off Coppers for a hundred bucks each, you should only take one shotgun and nine cheap skins in the same quality from some other collection. But you can learn all the intricacies of crafting in our guide.
Collections are certainly worth an understanding of what they are. This knowledge is useful to everyone: both those who just grind skins in matchmaking and those who try their luck and attempt to craft a rare skin from an old collection.
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