AK-47 | Frontside Misty (Field-Tested)

Field-Tested (FT) is the middle option on the AK-47 | Frontside Misty, the rifle painted in arctic colors. Inside this grade the float covers 0.15 to 0.38. The rank is Classified, and the finish comes out of the Shadow Case. Its collection is dated September 17, 2015.

What the AK-47 | Frontside Misty looks like in Field-Tested

The body is painted in bright arctic tones — pale blue, white and turquoise, laid down in broad smears like snow in motion. The artwork has no hard borders; it is built on gradients, and that is what makes it easy to recognize from a distance. In Field-Tested the scuffing settles on the edges and the magazine, but it reads softly against the light base, because rubbed metal sits close in tone to the paint itself. Wear shows most on the darker blue areas.

What to check before buying

A few points are worth going through before buying the AK-47 | Frontside Misty:

• the float, since a light base forgives wear, though by 0.38 the blue areas go noticeably gray;


• stickers left by the previous owner, and a name tag.

The artwork repeats identically on every copy, so nobody pays extra for a pattern here.

At the bottom of the band the blue lies evenly; at the top, pale metal shows through along the edges.

What the AK-47 | Frontside Misty costs in Field-Tested

The neighboring grades line up like this:

• Factory New is dearer by roughly seven and a half times;


• Minimal Wear by about eighty-five percent;


• Well-Worn asks practically the same;


• Battle-Scarred is barely different in price either.

A sevenfold gap to the clean grade looks strange until you look at the scale. On this skin it starts at 0.02 rather than zero, so Factory New gets a narrow strip from 0.02 to 0.07, about a sixteenth of the whole. Narrowness is what the premium buys there. The three lower grades hold level with each other, so there is nothing to save by going under Field-Tested.

Getting the AK-47 | Frontside Misty

The AK-47 | Frontside Misty drops from the Shadow Case. No other case in the game carries this rifle.

A contract builds one as well: ten skins of the rank below return a single Classified finish, and filling the contract from this collection makes the result come from it. The float of the result follows from whatever went into the contract.

One rung higher sits the Covert rank. Ten Classified skins of the Shadow set yield either M4A1-S | Golden Coil or USP-S | Kill Confirmed. Both cost around four times what the Frontside Misty does, and that is the main reason to assemble such a contract.

StatTrak and Souvenir

Stickers and craft on the AK-47 | Frontside Misty

The AK-47 | Frontside Misty 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.

A light, cold base calls for dark stickers: black and navy read well, while white and pale blue vanish into the smears completely. Red gives a sharp contrast that still fits. Room for a craft is there on the stock and on the handguard both. In CS2 artwork without clear borders gets in a sticker's way nowhere, which is rare among finishes built around a scene.

Who this wear suits

Buying the Frontside Misty in Field-Tested is justified when:

• a light AK in cold tones is wanted for CS2 without the sevenfold markup of Factory New;


• soft wear is acceptable, since on this base it barely registers;


• a craft is planned, because the blurred artwork lives well with stickers.

The darker blue areas go gray toward the top of the band. Anyone who needs full saturation should look at Minimal Wear, dearer by about eighty-five percent.