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Around forty cases exist in CS2. They do not perform equally. Some return roughly seventy cents on the dollar over a large sample, others closer to thirty, and the difference comes down to what a case costs against what its contents are worth.
Here is how the ranking is built and what it currently shows.
How ROI Is Calculated
Take every item a case can produce. Multiply each by its probability — 79.92 percent Mil-Spec, 15.98 percent Restricted, 3.20 percent Classified, 0.64 percent Covert, 0.26 percent Rare Special. Multiply by current market value. Add them together.
That total is the expected return on one opening. Divide it by the combined cost of the case and the $2.49 key, and you have the ROI.
One number to hold onto before reading any further: no case in the game returns more than it costs. The best performers sit around seventy percent, which means a thirty percent loss per opening over a large enough sample. There is no case that beats the house.
The Best Current Performers
The eSports 2013 Winter Case leads most calculations, at roughly seventy percent. It is also the most expensive to buy, trading around twenty dollars, which means each attempt costs over twenty-two dollars all in. High ratio, high absolute cost.
The Prisma Case performs almost as well at a fraction of the price. At around two dollars, the total cost per opening sits near four fifty, and the ROI lands in the high sixties. On a cost-per-attempt basis it is the most accessible of the strong performers.
The Gamma Case and Chroma 2 Case both sit in the high sixties as well, at four to five dollars each. CS:GO Weapon Case 3 performs comparably but costs over twenty dollars to enter.
Why Discontinued Cases Score Better
Every case in the top group left the active drop pool years ago. That is not a coincidence.
Active-pool cases are still dropping, twice a week, to every player. Supply grows continuously, prices stay at pennies, and the contents have had less time to appreciate. Discontinued cases have fixed supply and contents that have been appreciating for years, which lifts the ratio.
The trade-off is entry cost. A discontinued case with a good ratio may cost forty times what an active-pool case costs, and a better percentage of a much larger number is not automatically the better decision.
The Caveats That Matter
Ratios move. These are calculated from live market prices and a significant update can rewrite the table in a day. The October 2025 change that made knives craftable cut the value of the rare special slot across every case simultaneously, which is a large part of why current ROI figures look worse than historical ones.
ROI is also an average across a large sample, not a prediction. The gold tier carries a disproportionate share of the expected value and you will not hit it. Median outcome is far below mean outcome, and the median is the one you will actually experience.
Market prices for the contents also assume you can sell at market. Fees remove fifteen percent on Steam before the money reaches a wallet you cannot withdraw from.
Using the Ranking Sensibly
Treat this as a comparison of relative cost rather than a guide to profit. If you are going to open cases anyway, opening ones with better ratios loses you less than opening ones with worse ratios. That is the whole benefit, and it applies whether you are opening through Steam or through a third-party platform such as CSGO Gem Case Battles, where an additional margin sits on top of the base maths.
The thirty percent gap between cost and return is the product working as designed. Nothing in this table changes that. It only tells you which version of it costs the least.
