AWP | Lightning Strike (Factory New)

The AWP | Lightning Strike in Factory New (FN) is one of the first AWPs in the game, and its wear scale is cut off at the top at 0.08. By float, this wear takes 0.00 to 0.07. The skin is Covert rank and comes from the CS:GO Weapon Case. The collection came out on August 14, 2013.

What the AWP | Lightning Strike looks like in Factory New

White lightning bolts are laid over black metallic, done in paint with an anodized effect. The metal underlayer shows through the paint, so the black looks deep rather than flat. The bolts run the length of the barrel and meet at the scope, and the picture reads both in the inventory and on inspection. In FN the edges of the bolts are crisp, with no blur, and the black background is even along the whole length.

What to check before buying

Two things are worth checking:

• the float: on dark anodized paint, scuffs turn light and catch the eye;


• stickers and a name tag on the copy.

You will not get an AWP | Lightning Strike with an unusual pattern: the artwork is shared by every copy.

The wear takes 0.00 to 0.07, with no spread that would be worth paying extra for.

What the AWP | Lightning Strike costs in Factory New

The starting price sits in the listing block above the text. There is only one neighboring wear here: Minimal Wear costs about a quarter more.

That is not a glitch in the listings but a consequence of the scale. The skin's wear ends at 0.08, so Minimal Wear (MW) takes a strip just one hundredth wide, and several times fewer copies fall into it than into the clean wear. The lower wears, Field-Tested, Well-Worn and Battle-Scarred, do not exist for this AWP at all: their ranges begin beyond the top of the scale. For the buyer the arrangement is convenient: the best look is also the most affordable.

Getting the AWP | Lightning Strike

The AWP | Lightning Strike belongs to the Arms Deal Collection and drops from the CS:GO Weapon Case.

You can build the skin instead of buying it: ten skins of the rank below from this set go in. One rank down in the Arms Deal Collection stand the AK-47 | Case Hardened and the Desert Eagle | Hypnotic. The Covert rank in the set holds a single skin, so what comes out is known in advance. How clean the result is depends on the inputs.

Beyond that, the Covert rank goes into a knife craft, and the set is a historic one. The Arms Deal Collection yields the Bayonet, Flip Knife, Gut Knife, Karambit and M9 Bayonet. These are the very five models with which the history of knives in the game began.

StatTrak and Souvenir

Stickers and craft on the AWP | Lightning Strike

The AWP | Lightning Strike has a StatTrak version. Souvenir copies of the finish exist too, though no packages were ever issued for it: they were made only for the tournament map collections. Such copies are built through the Souvenir-O-Matic, which applies gold tournament stickers and a player autograph to an ordinary skin from your inventory.

The dark background with white bolts takes stickers well, but you have to choose the spot: a sticker across a bolt breaks the picture. They usually go on the stock and magazine, along the body. By color, blue and white suit it, picking up the bolt, while warm colors fight the cold palette. On older skins like this one, tournament stickers from the same years look good.

Who this wear suits

Buying the AWP | Lightning Strike in Factory New makes sense when:

• you want crisp bolt edges with no blur;


• you want one of the first AWPs in CS2 without overpaying: FN is cheaper than MW here;


• an even black background without light scuffs matters.

The artwork was made by 2013 standards and looks restrained next to modern finishes. Still, in CS2 it is recognized instantly.