Operation Hydra Case is a CS2 case with 17 items plus 24 gold entries. It costs $25.00; opening it with the key comes to $27.84. The expected value of the contents is $14.04 — a 50.5% unboxing ROI, or 50.7% when trade-up contracts are factored in.
Takeaway: an opening costs $27.84 and returns $14.04 on average — a 49.5% long-run loss. The median opening returns $3.77: half of all tries return that much or less. The key eats 10% of your spend. A full breakdown of every case is in the article Best CS2 cases in August 2026.
Where Operation Hydra Case came from
More facts about Operation Hydra Case
May 23, 2017release date · 9 yr ago
retiredweekly drops · as of 2026-07-02
−3.9%price over 2 weeks
448live listings in our DB
$638buy all 17 non-gold skins
Buying the contents outright is cheaper than unboxing: all 17 regular skins cost $638 — the price of 22.9 openings at $27.84 each. The priciest is AWP | Oni Taiji at $208, the cheapest is Tec-9 | Cut Out at $2.27.
The case is retired from weekly drops: no new copies enter the game, and existing ones are consumed by openings.
No. An opening costs $27.84 ($25.00 for the case plus $2.84 for the key) while the contents average $14.04 — a 50.5% ROI. The chance a single opening returns more than you spent is 6.1%.
How much does it cost to open Operation Hydra Case?
$27.84: the case itself is $25.00 (cheapest on CSFloat) plus the $2.84 key. Keys are sold only by Valve at a fixed price.
What do you usually get from Operation Hydra Case?
The median single opening returns $3.77 — half of all openings return that much or less against a $27.84 cost. The best 10% of openings drop an item worth more than $20.56.
What does the "with contracts" column mean?
Some drops are worth more as trade-up contract inputs than sold outright. Counting the better of "sell" vs "feed into a contract", the Operation Hydra Case ROI rises from 50.5% to 50.7%.
What are the knife odds in Operation Hydra Case?
0.26% — roughly one opening in 391. The gold pool has 24 entries picked with equal probability; the wear rolls separately. That many openings cost about $10,884.
Where is Operation Hydra Case cheapest?
Right now the low is $25.00 on CSFloat; the highest we track is $43.51 — a 74% spread between markets.
Prices are aggregated from 11 marketplaces into our own database and refresh automatically; USD values are converted from RUB at the current central-bank rate. CS2Price does not sell items — we compare prices and compute profitable trade-up contracts. Not affiliated with Valve.
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