GETTING STARTED WITH YOUR CSGO SKINS INVENTORY

There’s a saying that you have to have money to make money; in CSGO, this is no different. However, if you want to start piling up a nice inventory, there are a few places to start. It’s mostly dependent on how much time and money you want to put in, and I’ll go through a couple different options. Keep in mind:

• There are tradeoffs between each way of piling up an inventory, and you need to figure out which is best for you.
• Most of the money that you put into CSGO will stay there, and it is very hard to cash out unless you are willing to withdraw only 30% of what your inventory is “worth”.

With that much said, here’s the best ways to start your CSGO skins inventory.

Save up your in-game drops!

While playing CSGO, at the end of every match there are item drops. These are often cases, but there are also weapon skins. You can get up to 4 drops per week. Over time, your inventory will slowly grow, and if you’re lucky you might get a drop that’s worth a dollar or more. This is a slow but surefire way to get an inventory, and you can trade your cheap skins or sell them on the community market to get better and better skins.

This is really the only option if you don’t want to spend money, and it’s certainly the slowest. But with enough patience, you can begin to trade up your inventory, which I’ll cover in the next section.

Buy Steam Credit at a Store

Steam Credit can be found at any major electronics store, and can even be bought with subway gift cards. This is by far the best way of getting a cool inventory without spending a lot of money because it’s a one-time transaction, and there are a lot of things you can buy directly off the market. However, this is not the most efficient way to spend your money, and if you’re looking to spend more than $20, I would not recommend this.

OP Skins

OP Skins is by far the best place to get good deals on skins. You will find skins that are up to 30% off their market value, and these weapons are instantly tradable (On the community market, you have to wait 7 days to be able to trade/sell your skins). OPSkins is especially useful for buying knives because (with recent, awesome updates) their market now shows the “wear” of the skins that you buy and gives you the dollar amount that it is worth compared to the price you pay.

The wear is important because it is further reflective of how good the weapon looks within each tier, so you can find a field-tested skin that looks like a minimal-wear. Finally, OPSkins is the best option with the Google Chrome “OPDeals” extension, which shows you what percentage off the market value you’re buying. This is doubly helpful if you’re looking to flip your skins to make a profit, and overall get a grasp of how good of a deal you’re getting.

Downsides of OPSkins:

• You have to make an account,
• You cannot buy more than $100 worth of credit without proof of identification,
• The transactions involve trade bots, which may be difficult for new players or those unfamiliar with using them.

These are methods for starting your inventory off, but as we all know that buying skins is not just a one-time thing.

Here are some things you can do with your new skins!

Trading

Trading is one of the hallmarks of online economies. Ever since Team Fortress 2, trading has become wildly popular in Valve’s games. In CSGO, the main trading medium is CSGO Lounge, which allows people to post their offers and meet other traders. You can always peruse the latest posts, but first you’ll want to download a CSGO Lounge extension for Google Chrome. I and most big-time traders use Lounge Destroyer, and it works very well. You can consolidate the value of your inventory by trading many skins for one better skin (which is often difficult and requires overpay), you can trade one good skin for a lot of cheaper ones, or you can make a one to one trade.

Knives are the most common for 1-1 trades because knives are expensive, and rather than selling a knife to buy a new knife it is easier to just trade for one of similar value. Thus, you can often increase the value of your inventory in minute values through 1 to 1 trades. Keep in mind that this is very time consuming; however, the sense of accomplishment of starting with a low-value skin and ending up with a knife embodies the ultimate satisfaction from trading. There’s some great videos called “From Nothing to a Knife”, and they exemplify this type of trading.

However, be very very careful of scammers on CSGO Lounge. Never, ever trust anyone offering you direct Paypal for a skin, and if they do use a popular middle-man. Whenever you trade, make sure the wear of their skin is exactly what you intended on getting. People sometimes say something is factory-new when in fact it is field-tested. With that said, CSGO Lounge is a great resource, and only takes a little bit of practice to understand how to use it effectively.

Gambling

By introducing CSGO Lounge, it’s unavoidable to be exposed to their E-sport gambling. I would highly recommend not gambling until you know how much skins are worth or if you’re afraid to lose what you have, since it is much more likely that you will lose than win. Do not gamble on professional CSGO games unless you follow E-sports closely and are able to discern skewed odds. Gambling is a very serious problem for many traders, and in the end it causes most people to lose.

Enjoy your skins!

Now that you have built your inventory, you can just enjoy your skins!! People often recognize high-value or cool skins, and they provide a nice change of scenery in a sometimes stressful game. Others can pick up your weapon skins after you die, and it adds another layer of competition and dominance among the players. I wish you guys the best of luck on starting out your inventory, and as always, don’t troll my soloqueue!