Shadow Case is a CS2 case with 16 items plus 13 gold entries. It costs $1.41; opening it with the key comes to $4.25. The expected value of the contents is $1.78 — a 41.9% unboxing ROI, or 43.6% when trade-up contracts are factored in.
Takeaway: an opening costs $4.25 and returns $1.78 on average — a 58.1% long-run loss. The median opening returns $0.35: half of all tries return that much or less. The key eats 67% of your spend. A full breakdown of every case is in the article Best CS2 cases in August 2026.
Where Shadow Case came from
More facts about Shadow Case
September 17, 2015release date · 11 yr ago
retiredweekly drops · as of 2026-07-02
+0.5%price over 2 weeks
1,279live listings in our DB
$127buy all 16 non-gold skins
Buying the contents outright is cheaper than unboxing: all 16 regular skins cost $127 — the price of 30.0 openings at $4.25 each. The priciest is USP-S | Kill Confirmed at $51.05, the cheapest is XM1014 | Scumbria at $0.14.
The case is retired from weekly drops: no new copies enter the game, and existing ones are consumed by openings.
No. An opening costs $4.25 ($1.41 for the case plus $2.84 for the key) while the contents average $1.78 — a 41.9% ROI. The chance a single opening returns more than you spent is 5.2%.
How much does it cost to open Shadow Case?
$4.25: the case itself is $1.41 (cheapest on Skinport) plus the $2.84 key. Keys are sold only by Valve at a fixed price.
What do you usually get from Shadow Case?
The median single opening returns $0.35 — half of all openings return that much or less against a $4.25 cost. The best 10% of openings drop an item worth more than $2.77.
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 Shadow Case ROI rises from 41.9% to 43.6%.
What are the knife odds in Shadow Case?
0.26% — roughly one opening in 391. The gold pool has 13 entries picked with equal probability; the wear rolls separately. That many openings cost about $1,660.
Where is Shadow Case cheapest?
Right now the low is $1.41 on Skinport; the highest we track is $2.57 — a 82% 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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