OG Cases
Every market has its blue chips. In the case market they're the crates that have been out of circulation the longest — the ones a decade of unboxing has already burned through. This basket holds three of them.
The index, live
One point per day: the sum of every item's Steam Market median price, divided by the number of items — an equal-weight price index for the whole basket, from the first day all members existed.
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The thesis
A case only leaves the market one way: someone opens it, and it's gone forever. The older the case, the more of that one-way attrition has already happened — and the rarer new drops become as Valve rotates old cases out of the active pool. The oldest cases in the game have had ten-plus years of both. What's left is a small, still-shrinking float facing demand that renews with every new generation of players who want to open a piece of history.
These aren't the cases that will 10x on a patch note. They're the ones that have already survived every crash the market has thrown at them — the 2018 trade-hold exodus, the 2021 China panic, the corrections in between — and kept grinding higher, because the supply mechanism never stopped working. That's what makes them the anchor allocation: the basket you size largest and think about least.
What's inside
CS:GO Weapon Case (2013). The first case ever shipped. It arrived with the Arms Deal update in August 2013 — the update that invented the skin economy — and it contains the market's founding icons: the AWP Lightning Strike and the AK-47 Case Hardened. It stopped dropping meaningfully years ago, and its price history is the chart everyone points to when they explain why case supply mechanics matter: from pocket change to a three-figure collectible, one opened case at a time. Owning it is owning the genesis block of the market.
Operation Breakout Weapon Case (2014). The case that introduced the Butterfly Knife — still, a decade later, one of the most demanded knives in the game — alongside the M4A1-S Cyrex and Glock Water Elemental. Its supply story is stricter than most: it dropped primarily during Operation Breakout, to players who bought the operation pass. When the operation ended, the spigot closed. A capped-issuance case with the single most coveted knife pool of its era is about as clean as a supply thesis gets.
Glove Case (2016). The first case in history where the rare special item isn't a knife — it's gloves. That gives it a moat no later case can take away: it's one of the few sources of the original glove series, and gloves became a status item on par with knives. It's the youngest member of this basket, which also makes it the one with the most attrition still ahead of it.
The basket at a glance
| Item | Released | Claim to fame | Supply status |
|---|---|---|---|
| CS:GO Weapon Case | Aug 2013 | First case ever · AWP Lightning Strike | Rare drop pool, decade of attrition |
| Operation Breakout Case | Jul 2014 | Butterfly Knife debut · M4A1-S Cyrex | Operation-gated issuance, ended 2014 |
| Glove Case | Nov 2016 | First gloves in the game | Rare drop pool |
How to hold it
This is the basket built for dollar-cost averaging: prices are high enough that lump-sum timing hurts, and liquid enough that daily small buys fill cleanly. Split a fixed budget three ways, buy on schedule, and let the float shrink underneath you. The classic mistake is chasing it during hype spikes — these cases reprice violently around market-wide events, and corrections are where the stack gets cheap.