★ Butterfly Knife | Doppler Phase 2 (Minimal Wear)

Minimal Wear is the upper of the two wears the ★ Butterfly Knife | Doppler Phase 2 comes in, and it costs more than Factory New (FN). Covert rank, with the ★ mark. Doppler floats top out at 0.08, so this paint never appears in Field-Tested or anything more worn. It comes out of the Spectrum Case and the Spectrum 2 Case.

What the ★ Butterfly Knife | Doppler Phase 2 looks like in Minimal Wear

The blade is mainly bright pink, with purple and violet streaks running through it, thicker and darker toward the heel. White highlights gather along the edge. There are no stamps or numbers on the steel. The handles are black, each half crossed by a raspberry-red stripe, and the latch is pink.

This wear takes the float range 0.07 to 0.08. In Minimal Wear, scuffs already show on the cutting edge and the tip of the blade. On the ribs of the handles the pink wears through to bare metal in places. Factory New has none of that. Within 0.07 to 0.08 there is no best copy to pick out.

Where the ★ Butterfly Knife | Doppler Phase 2 came from

Valve designed and painted the finish itself. Doppler entered the game on March 15, 2017: the update notes introduced it alongside the Spectrum Case, and the same paint was later added to the Spectrum 2 Case. Valve's finish catalog lists Doppler as number 419. By then the butterfly knife had already been in CS2 for three years.

Phase and pattern

The phase is written into the item name, so the buyer picks it. In the CS2 data the finish has seven phases: Phases 1 to 4 are the ordinary ones, while Ruby, Sapphire and Black Pearl are the rare variants called gems. A gem is a single solid color. Phase 2 is built from pink and purple, and the share of each depends on the pattern index.

That is why two copies of Phase 2 side by side can look quite different, and a lucky index earns a premium. A blade whose front face is almost entirely pink is called "Max Pink" or "Pink Galaxy"; one that is mostly pink with some purple left over is "BTA Pink". Wear has no say in this draw, and a rare index turns up in Minimal Wear as well. Phase 2 gets confused with Ruby because of the preview: both blades look red-pink there. On a Ruby the blade is scarlet and the handle stripe is red-orange.

What to check before buying

On a listing for the ★ Butterfly Knife | Doppler Phase 2, check these:

• the front face of the blade in the screenshot, and the pattern index itself;


• the phase in the name, since a gem with a similar preview costs several times more;


• any applied name, because the knife takes a name tag but never has stickers;


• the StatTrak mark, which makes it a different item with its own price.

What the ★ Butterfly Knife | Doppler Phase 2 costs in Minimal Wear

Factory New is cheaper by about a tenth, so a clean blade here costs no more than a worn one. Among the butterfly knife's Covert finishes, Phase 2 in this wear is third from the top: only Ruby and the emerald Gamma Doppler ask more. Phase 3 and the Butterfly Knife | Fade cost half as much, and Gamma Doppler in its second phase is also about half.

Getting the ★ Butterfly Knife | Doppler Phase 2

The Spectrum Case and the Spectrum 2 Case give the knife as a rare ★ item, with a random phase and a random index. The second route is a craft: five Covert skins turn into a single gold weapon, which the game also picks. So a Phase 2 of the kind you want is usually bought as a ready listing.

StatTrak and Souvenir

The ★ Butterfly Knife | Doppler Phase 2 exists with StatTrak; no Souvenir version was ever issued.

Who this wear suits

Minimal Wear is worth buying for three things:

• a pink blade with no surcharge for a gem;


• access to the same "Max Pink" indexes as in Factory New;


• edge scuffs that are not visible at in-game distance.