AK-47 | Cartel (Field-Tested)

The AK-47 | Cartel in Field-Tested (FT) is a working middle ground between the clean and the battered wears for the engraved AK-47. The wear range is 0.15 to 0.38. It is Classified rank, and the skin comes from the Chroma Case. The Chroma Collection came out on January 8, 2015.

What the AK-47 | Cartel looks like in Field-Tested

An engraving runs over the body: skeletons, flowers and snakes drawn in a thin line on a dark ground with gold accents. The artwork is small and dense, made to be studied up close rather than recognized from afar. In FT the scuffs follow the edges of the receiver and the magazine, where the engraving is rubbed back to the base. The artwork itself survives, because it sits on the flat areas that wear last.

What to check before buying

The choice comes down to two things:

• float: on a thin engraved line, wear shows sooner than on solid paint;


• stickers and a name already applied to the weapon.

Copies do not differ in artwork, and there is no "rare" pattern: the engraving is identical on all of them.

The band from 0.15 to 0.38 is long, and the cleaner listings sit closer to 0.15.

What the AK-47 | Cartel costs in Field-Tested

The neighboring wears cost like this:

• Factory New costs about three times as much;


• Minimal Wear costs about a third more;


• Well-Worn is dearer by about a quarter;


• Battle-Scarred costs about a tenth more.

FT is the cheapest of the five wears here, cheaper even than Battle-Scarred. The skin's scale runs up to 0.75, and FT takes nearly a third of its length, whereas Well-Worn takes about a tenth. For the buyer this is a direct gain: the tidier look costs less than the battered one.

Getting the AK-47 | Cartel

The AK-47 | Cartel drops from the Chroma Case, and this rifle has never appeared in any other case.

The second route is the trade-up contract: ten skins one rank down from this collection yield one Classified skin. Desert Eagle | Naga, Dual Berettas | Urban Shock or MAC-10 | Malachite will do. Three Classified skins share the set, so the result is random, and the rifle comes up one time in three. The wear of the output follows the wear of the inputs.

The Cartel itself also goes into contracts, one step up. Ten Classified skins of the collection give one Covert skin, and there are two here, AWP | Man-o'-war and Galil AR | Chatterbox. They cost about eight times as much as the Classified ones, which is why such contracts are made all the time.

What matters to a buyer is that these contracts use the cheapest Classified skins in the set, P250 | Muertos and M4A4 | 龍王 (Dragon King). Of the three Classified skins the Cartel is the most expensive, and contract demand does not push its price up.

StatTrak and Souvenir

Stickers and craft on the AK-47 | Cartel

The AK-47 | Cartel has a StatTrak version. Souvenir copies of the finish turn up as well, though no Souvenir packages were ever made for it: packages only ever covered tournament map collections. Those copies are built with the Souvenir-O-Matic, which puts gold tournament stickers and a player autograph on a normal skin from the inventory.

Dense engraving makes a busy ground, and stickers work poorly on it: small ones drown in the lines, large ones cover the scene. If a craft in CS2 is wanted all the same, people use plain dark stickers and put them on the stock, away from the main artwork. Gold stickers merge completely with the accents of the body.

Who this wear suits

Field-Tested is worth buying for the Cartel if at least one of these holds for the AK-47 | Cartel:

• you like fine engraving that shows up on inspection in CS2;


• price matters: FT here costs less than every other wear, the lower ones included;


• you want a wide choice of float within a single wear.

The artwork is meant for close viewing, and in a match all that is left of it is a dark body with a gold sheen.