M4A1-S | Nightmare (Field-Tested)

Field-Tested (FT) on the M4A1-S | Nightmare is the second most common wear for this rifle. It takes almost a quarter of the wear scale, and only Battle-Scarred takes more. Its floats are bounded by 0.15 and 0.38. It is a Classified skin that comes from the Horizon Case, and the collection itself is dated August 1, 2018, five years before CS2 came out.

What the M4A1-S | Nightmare looks like in Field-Tested

On the side of the receiver is drawn the face of a creature of the night: teeth, eyes and claws in a cold blue-green range over a dark base. The artwork takes up almost the whole side and is built on thin light lines, which create the glow effect. The suppressor and stock stay dark, with no subject.

In FT the edges of the receiver and the top of the magazine dull. The light lines of the artwork stay whole, since they lie in the center of the side. Toward 0.38 metal shows on the trigger guard and at the base of the suppressor, and the glow loses some of its depth, because a light patch appears beside it.

What to check before buying

What to compare when choosing an M4A1-S | Nightmare:

• the float: the glowing lines gain from the untouched dark background around them;


• whatever stickers and name tag the previous owner left on it.

All copies of the M4A1-S | Nightmare show an identical pattern.

For the M4A1-S | Nightmare the float number matters more than the wear label: the band of 0.15 to 0.38 holds different looks.

What the M4A1-S | Nightmare costs in Field-Tested

The row across wears looks like this:

• Factory New costs more than twenty times as much;


• Minimal Wear costs about two and a half times as much;


• Well-Worn is cheaper by about a third;


• Battle-Scarred is also about a third cheaper.

The twentyfold gap to Factory New is not about looks. Clean copies of this skin are scarce, and what is paid for here is the scarcity itself, not the fact that the listing looks better in game. The practical ceiling is Minimal Wear at two and a half times: beyond it the money goes into the collector's plane.

Getting the M4A1-S | Nightmare

The M4A1-S | Nightmare drops from the Horizon Case and belongs to its collection.

For the M4A1-S | Nightmare a trade-up takes ten skins of the rank below from the same collection. You can hand in, for example, the AWP | PAW, CZ75-Auto | Eco, G3SG1 | High Seas, MP7 | Powercore or Nova | Toy Soldier. The set has three Classified skins, so the result is random: the chance of landing the M4A1-S is one in three. The wear of the result is computed from the skins put in.

Further up, the Classified rank leads higher: ten Classified skins of the Horizon give one Covert skin, either the AK-47 | Neon Rider or the Desert Eagle | Code Red. These two skins hold up the price of the whole collection, which is why contracts from the Classified rank are built all the time.

StatTrak and Souvenir

The M4A1-S | Nightmare has a StatTrak version. Souvenir copies of the finish do exist too, but no packages were 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.

Stickers and craft on the M4A1-S | Nightmare

A dark base with a glowing drawing is a background that is contrasting and already taken. Light stickers read on it but drown out the glow; dark one-color stickers and holograms in a cool range work better. In CS2 the room for a craft is on the suppressor and stock, and the side with the face should not be covered. Green stickers merge with the lines of the artwork almost completely.

Who this wear suits

Buying the M4A1-S | Nightmare in Field-Tested makes sense in these situations:

• you want a dark M4A1-S for CS2 with a large subject on the side;


• the clean wears are off the table: the gap to Factory New (FN) is twentyfold;


• you want to choose by the number: the float band here is long.

The drawback of this wear is that light metal along the edges sits next to the glowing lines and mutes them a little. Listings up to 0.22 hardly show this effect.