The Butterfly Knife is one of the most iconic knives in CS2 — and since Valve introduced the covert-to-knife trade-up system in late 2025, getting one has become more accessible than ever before. You no longer have to rely purely on case opening luck. With the right five covert skins and the right collection, you can roll directly for a Butterfly Knife through a trade-up contract. This guide explains exactly how it works, which collections to use, what your odds are, and whether it's actually worth it financially.
You can now turn five Covert (red) skins directly into a Gold Special Item — that includes knives and gloves.
The mechanics are straightforward:
You need five skins of the same rarity (only Covert) and the same type. You can't mix StatTrak and regular skins. When you have enough, you just go to the Trade Up Contracts tab, select them and proceed.
One critical detail: the float of the output is based on the average float of your five inputs. This means if you feed the contract five Factory New coverts with very low floats, your output knife will reflect that — and for some finishes like Doppler Black Pearl, float determines whether the pattern can even appear. Always think about your input floats before committing.
Also important: if you don't buy your inputs from the Steam Community Market, you have to wait 7 days before you can put them into a contract. Budget for this wait time if you're sourcing skins from third-party marketplaces like white.market if you want to get skins cheaper than on Steam.
The Butterfly Knife exists in only five cases: Operation Breakout Weapon Case, Dreams & Nightmares Case, Operation Riptide Case, Spectrum 2 Case, and Spectrum Case.
Each collection has its own pool of covert input skins, its own Butterfly Knife finishes as possible outputs, and — critically — different odds of actually getting a Butterfly. Here's the full breakdown.
This is the cleanest approach. If you want to make sure that the result of your Trade Up operation is a Butterfly Knife, you must only use Covert skins from the only CS2 case that contains only Butterfly knife skins — the Operation Breakout Weapon Case.
M4A1-S | Cyrex — guarantees a Butterfly Knife if used alone or mixed with P90 Asiimov
P90 | Asiimov — same guarantee when used alone or mixed with M4A1-S Cyrex
The tradeoff is cost. For a 100% chance of getting a Butterfly, five Covert skins from the Breakout Collection will cost you almost $500. You're guaranteed a Butterfly — but you have no control over which finish drops. You could get a Vanilla or a Fade. Both are valuable, but the range is wide.
Fade, Slaughter, Crimson Web, Tiger Tooth, Damascus Steel, Ultraviolet, Blue Steel, Boreal Forest, Forest DDPAT, Rust Coat, Stained, Night, Vanilla
The Dreams & Nightmares Case contains Butterfly Knives but also shares its knife pool with several other knife types, which dilutes your odds significantly.
When putting in only those two skins in your trade-up, you have a chance of 3.33% to get each of those Butterfly knives, which makes a total of 20% total chance to end up with a Butterfly knife, while the other 80% are Bowie Knives, Falchion Knives, Huntsman Knives, and Shadow Daggers.
The upside: the possible Butterfly finishes from this case include some extremely desirable options.
Lore, Autotronic, Gamma Doppler (all phases including Emerald), Black Laminate, Marble Fade, Tiger Tooth, Doppler (all phases), Crimson Web, Fade
The Butterfly Knife | Gamma Doppler Emerald is one of the most valuable knife finishes in CS2 and only drops from this case and the Riptide Case. The Butterfly Knife Gamma Doppler Emerald is included in two collections: Dreams & Nightmares Collection and Operation Riptide Collection.
Riptide shares the exact same Butterfly knife pool as Dreams & Nightmares, with the same 20% odds — just different covert input skins.
The same 80/20 split applies here — four out of five contracts will land on a different knife type (Bowie, Falchion, Huntsman, or Shadow Daggers). The Butterfly finishes available are identical to Dreams & Nightmares, including the Gamma Doppler Emerald.
The main reason to use Riptide over Dreams & Nightmares is input skin pricing. Check both on white.market before committing — the cheaper pair of input skins between the two cases is the better play, since the output pool is identical.
The Spectrum Case has a different Butterfly finish pool than the above two cases — notably it includes some of the highest-value Butterfly finishes in the entire game.
P250 See Ya Later
Doppler (all phases including Black Pearl), Marble Fade, Tiger Tooth, Autotronic, Lore, Black Laminate, Ultraviolet, Damascus Steel, Rust Coat
The Butterfly Knife | Doppler Black Pearl drops exclusively from the Spectrum pool. To get it from a trade-up, use Covert skins from the Spectrum or Spectrum 2 Collections. The average float must be ≤ 0.08, otherwise the Black Pearl will not drop. If you're chasing a Black Pearl, float management on your inputs is not optional — it's essential.
Spectrum 2 shares a largely overlapping Butterfly finish pool with Spectrum and uses different covert skins as inputs.
Same dynamics as Spectrum — check input skin prices to compare whether Spectrum or Spectrum 2 inputs give you a better cost-per-attempt.
You can mix covert skins from different collections in the same contract. The trade-up then draws from a combined pool based on how many inputs you put from each case.
Put three Breakout coverts and two Spectrum coverts and you have a three-fifths chance to roll the Butterfly pool (from Breakout) and a two-fifths chance to roll Spectrum's knife pool.
This means mixing gives you partial odds rather than the guaranteed result of a pure Breakout contract. It can be a cost-saving strategy — if Breakout inputs are expensive, supplementing with cheaper Spectrum inputs reduces your total cost while still keeping a majority of your weight in the guaranteed Butterfly pool.
If you combine Covert items from multiple cases and some of them contain more than one knife skin type, your odds of getting the desired knife skin type get diluted. Always calculate the weighted odds before mixing.
Knife trade-ups in CS2 are not designed to be profitable long-term. In most cases, the expected value is slightly negative. You are paying for a chance at a higher-value item, not a guaranteed return. That doesn't mean it's a bad idea — it just means you should approach it with the right mindset.
Here's the honest breakdown by method:
Breakout (100% Butterfly) — you're guaranteed a Butterfly, but the finish is random. The average value across all possible Butterfly finishes from Breakout is reasonable, but you could land a Forest DDPAT or a Vanilla that's worth less than your inputs. The premium cases — Fade, Slaughter, Tiger Tooth — are statistically unlikely on any single attempt.
Dreams & Nightmares / Riptide (20% Butterfly) — four out of five contracts don't give you a Butterfly at all. The non-Butterfly outcomes (Bowie, Falchion, Huntsman, Shadow Daggers in the same finishes) are generally worth less than Butterfly equivalents. These are lower input cost but lower expected value per attempt.
Spectrum / Spectrum 2 (20% Butterfly, Black Pearl eligible) — the jackpot potential is the highest here due to the Black Pearl. But the odds of hitting it are tiny, and the input skins (Empress, Bloodsport, Neo-Noir) are not cheap. This is the highest variance route.
The most disciplined approach: use Breakout for a controlled attempt where you know you're getting a Butterfly, accept the finish variance, and evaluate whether the average expected output value exceeds your input cost at current market prices before every single attempt.
The difference between a profitable trade-up and a losing one often comes down to how much you paid for your inputs. Buying covert skins on white.market typically gives you meaningfully better pricing than the Steam Community Market — which directly affects whether any given trade-up attempt has positive or negative expected value.
Key advantages of sourcing trade-up inputs on white.market:
Prices consistently lower than Steam Market — on popular covert skins the difference can be 15–30%, which adds up significantly when buying five inputs per attempt
Large inventory across all relevant collections — Breakout, Dreams & Nightmares, Riptide, Spectrum, and Spectrum 2 inputs all available in one place
Float filtering — critical for float-sensitive attempts like Doppler Black Pearl, where inputs must average ≤ 0.08
Fast withdrawals — important given the 7-day hold on non-Steam marketplace purchases
Price history tracking — lets you time your input purchases when prices dip rather than buying at peaks
Trusted by millions of CS2 players worldwide — reliable for the higher-value transactions that covert inputs represent
Operation Breakout — inputs: M4A1-S Cyrex, P90 Asiimov — Butterfly chance: 100% — notable finishes: Fade, Slaughter, Tiger Tooth, Crimson Web
Dreams & Nightmares — inputs: AK-47 Nightwish, MP9 Starlight Protector — Butterfly chance: ~20% — notable finishes: Gamma Doppler Emerald, Lore, Fade, Marble Fade
Operation Riptide — inputs: AK-47 Leet Museo, Desert Eagle Ocean Dive — Butterfly chance: ~20% — notable finishes: same pool as Dreams & Nightmares including Gamma Doppler Emerald
Spectrum — inputs: AK-47 The Empress, AK-47 Bloodsport, USP-S Neo-Noir — Butterfly chance: ~20% — notable finishes: Doppler Black Pearl, Marble Fade, Autotronic
Spectrum 2 — inputs: AK-47 Neon Rider, M4A1-S Decimator, AWP Oni Taiji — Butterfly chance: ~20% — notable finishes: same pool as Spectrum including Black Pearl eligible
You need five Covert (red) quality skins from cases that contain the Butterfly Knife in their knife pool. Put them into the Trade Up Contract in your CS2 inventory and confirm. The output is one Gold-tier item (knife) drawn randomly from that collection's pool.
Using five Covert skins exclusively from the Operation Breakout Weapon Case guarantees a Butterfly Knife. The two eligible covert skins are M4A1-S Cyrex and P90 Asiimov. Any combination of these five will always output a Butterfly — though the specific finish is still random.
Approximately 20%. Both cases share their knife pool across five knife types (Butterfly, Bowie, Falchion, Huntsman, Shadow Daggers), each with roughly equal weighting. That means around one in five trade-up attempts using these inputs will produce a Butterfly Knife.
Yes, but only from Spectrum or Spectrum 2 collection inputs (AK-47 Bloodsport, The Empress, USP-S Neo-Noir, AK-47 Neon Rider, M4A1-S Decimator, AWP Oni Taiji). Additionally, your five input skins must average a float of 0.08 or below — otherwise the Black Pearl pattern cannot appear in the output.
Yes, significantly. The output knife's float is based on the average float of your five inputs. For regular finishes this matters for resale value — Factory New and Minimal Wear command large premiums. For pattern-dependent finishes like Doppler Black Pearl, float is a hard gate: average float above 0.08 makes the Black Pearl pattern impossible to roll.
Rarely in the long run. Expected value on most knife trade-ups is slightly negative — you're paying for probability, not a guaranteed return. The most controlled approach is using full Breakout inputs (100% Butterfly guaranteed) and carefully calculating whether average output value exceeds your input cost at current prices before committing.
Yes. Mixing changes your odds proportionally. For example, three Breakout coverts plus two Spectrum coverts gives you a 60% chance of rolling the Butterfly-only Breakout pool and a 40% chance of rolling the Spectrum pool. Mixing can reduce input cost but also dilutes your Butterfly guarantee if you're using Breakout as the anchor.
white.market consistently offers lower prices than the Steam Community Market for covert skins used in knife trade-ups, with float filtering available to help you target the right inputs for float-sensitive contracts. Buying inputs cheaper directly improves the expected value of every trade-up attempt.
If you buy covert skins from third-party marketplaces, you need to wait 7 days after the trade before they become eligible for a trade-up contract. Plan your purchase timing accordingly if you want to execute a specific contract on a specific date.
The Butterfly Knife Doppler Black Pearl is widely considered the most valuable Butterfly Knife finish in CS2 — only obtainable from Spectrum or Spectrum 2 trade-ups with correct float inputs, and commanding prices in the thousands of dollars for clean examples.
All information is based on CS2 trade-up mechanics as of May 2026. Input skin prices fluctuate — always verify current costs on white.market before executing any trade-up contract.