Shadow Case is a CS2 case with 16 items plus 13 gold entries. It costs $1.57; opening it with the key comes to $4.21. The expected value of the contents is $2.16 — a 51.2% unboxing ROI, or 53.4% when trade-up contracts are factored in.
Takeaway: an opening costs $4.21 and returns $2.16 on average — a 48.8% long-run loss. The median opening returns $0.44: half of all tries return that much or less. The key eats 63% 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
+3.2%price over 2 weeks
482live listings in our DB
$129buy all 16 non-gold skins
Buying the contents outright is cheaper than unboxing: all 16 regular skins cost $129 — the price of 30.7 openings at $4.21 each. The priciest is USP-S | Kill Confirmed at $50.40, the cheapest is XM1014 | Scumbria at $0.19.
The case is retired from weekly drops: no new copies enter the game, and existing ones are consumed by openings.
No. An opening costs $4.21 ($1.57 for the case plus $2.64 for the key) while the contents average $2.16 — a 51.2% ROI. The chance a single opening returns more than you spent is 10.1%.
How much does it cost to open Shadow Case?
$4.21: the case itself is $1.57 (cheapest on CSFloat) plus the $2.64 key. Keys are sold only by Valve at a fixed price.
What do you usually get from Shadow Case?
The median single opening returns $0.44 — half of all openings return that much or less against a $4.21 cost. The best 10% of openings drop an item worth more than $4.68.
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 51.2% to 53.4%.
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 $1,648.
Where is Shadow Case cheapest?
Right now the low is $1.57 on CSFloat; the highest we track is $2.57 — a 64% 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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