M4A4 | The Emperor (Field-Tested)

In Field-Tested (FT), the golden fan of rays on the M4A4 | The Emperor is already touched along the edges of the receiver. The blue body with its scatter of stars holds together whole. The Field-Tested float range of this rifle is 0.15 to 0.38. The rank is Covert, and the rifle drops from the Prisma Case.

What the M4A4 | The Emperor looks like in Field-Tested

The handguard, magazine, stock and grip are painted dark blue and bright blue, with golden lines, star-like dots and triangles strewn over them. The receiver is dark, a burgundy brown. It carries a portrait of a man framed by a widening fan of golden rays, with a gold glyph beside it: a loop with a bar across it. A light panel with a pale figure inside stands out on the blue handguard. The barrel, muzzle brake and rail are still black metal, and the front sight is gold.

Paint loss at this grade is uneven. The thin golden rays along the receiver's edges and the ribs of the handguard go first. The edges of the stock and the projecting part of the butt plate follow. The large blue fills last longer. The figure at the center of the receiver sits on a flat surface and is the last to go, so the scene of the finish is intact in FT.

Where the M4A4 | The Emperor came from

The artist Zaphk put the submission on the Steam Workshop on March 15, 2018, under the working title "M4A4| The Emperor". In its description the author called the work the second part of a collection based on tarot cards, coming after The Empress on the AK-47 and Mortis on the AWP. The Prisma Collection was added to the game on March 13, 2019, and in Valve's skin catalog the item is number 844.

What to check before buying

Buyers of the M4A4 | The Emperor look at the following:

• the float within 0.15 to 0.38: toward the low end, the golden rays on the edges are still unbroken;


• the butt plate and the ribs of the handguard, where the thin lines give out first;


• any stickers and name tag the previous owner left on the M4A4 | The Emperor.

The pattern index changes nothing on the M4A4 | The Emperor. In this wear the float stretch from 0.15 to 0.38 is a long one, so comparing several listings is worth the time.

What the M4A4 | The Emperor costs in Field-Tested

The other wears stand against FT like this:

• Factory New costs four times as much;


• Minimal Wear: about a seventh more;


• Well-Worn: also about a seventh more;


• Battle-Scarred is cheaper, but not by much.

There is one large gap on this finish, between the factory look and everything else. The four lower wears sit within a sixth of one another, and the more worn Well-Worn even costs more than FT. The flat pricing rests on the dark blue base: clean golden lines show on it only at the very bottom of the wear scale.

Among Covert M4A4s at this wear, the finish ranks seventh of fourteen by price. The closest one above is M4A4 | X-Ray, about two fifths more expensive. Right below it sit M4A4 | Full Throttle and M4A4 | Neo-Noir. The most expensive in the rank is M4A4 | The Coalition.

Getting the M4A4 | The Emperor

The main route is the Prisma Case, where the finish has sat at Covert rank since the collection's release. It also comes out of a trade-up contract fed with ten skins of the rank below from this collection. The Prisma Collection has two Covert skins, so the outcome of the swap is not known in advance.

StatTrak and Souvenir

A StatTrak version of the M4A4 | The Emperor exists. Souvenir copies of the finish exist as well, though no Souvenir packages were ever issued for it: those were made only for the tournament map collections. To make one, you feed an ordinary inventory skin to the Souvenir-O-Matic, and it adds gold tournament stickers and a player autograph.

Stickers and craft on the M4A4 | The Emperor

There is not much free space on the body. The right side of the receiver is taken by the figure in the rays, and the handguard by the light panel and the scatter of stars. That leaves the magazine and the stock, where the fills are even. In color the finish takes gold and warm orange, while lime green looks out of place beside the burgundy receiver.

Who this wear suits

The M4A4 | The Emperor in Field-Tested makes sense if:

• you want a Covert M4A4 at its rank without paying four times as much for the factory look;


• the rifle is for holding in CS2, where the scene on the receiver is hard to make out anyway;


• it matters to you that the portrait and the fan of rays are intact at this wear.

The choice between FT and the two most worn wears is not about money here, since the price gap is small. What decides it is how much you need the golden lines whole, and in the CS2 inventory they are visible when you inspect the skin.