Why sticker finish decides the price
Every sticker in Counter-Strike 2 has a printed design — a team logo, an artist craft, a player autograph — but that artwork is only half the story. The other half is the finish: the physical layer printed over the art that decides how it catches light. The same logo can ship as a dull Paper sticker or a shimmering Holo, and those two copies can sit at completely different price points despite showing the identical image.
Finish drives value because each tier is pulled from its capsule at different odds. Rarer finishes enter circulation far less often, and the flashiest ones are exactly what crafters want most. Scarcity plus demand is the whole engine behind sticker pricing. For the broader picture of how stickers work, start with our CS2 stickers explained guide.
Paper — the standard baseline
Paper is the default finish and the cheapest. It has no reflective layer at all: the art is printed flat and matte, exactly as it looks on the capsule preview. Most team stickers and the bulk of every capsule are Paper, so supply is high and prices stay low. Paper is the workhorse finish for cheap crafts and casual loadouts, and it's the baseline every other finish is measured against.
Glitter — a step up in sparkle
Glitter adds a fine sparkling layer that scatters light into tiny glints across the surface. It's brighter than Paper but doesn't shift colour — think of it as a textured shimmer rather than a rainbow. Glitter is pulled at lower odds than Paper, so it carries a modest premium, but it sits well below the marquee finishes. It's a popular middle ground for crafters who want some shine without Holo prices.
Holo — the rainbow shimmer everyone wants
Holo (holographic) is where prices start to jump. A diffraction layer breaks light into the full spectrum, so as you rotate the weapon the sticker washes through shifting rainbow bands. It's the most visually dramatic finish in a normal capsule and, for most designs, the one crafters chase hardest. Combine low pull odds with that high demand and a Holo routinely trades for several times — sometimes many times — its Paper equivalent. When people talk about "Holo crafts," this is the finish they mean.
Foil — metallic, mirror-bright, and scarce
Foil swaps the rainbow for a flat metallic mirror. Light bounces off it as a sharp, bright sheen rather than scattering into colour, giving a chrome-like look. Foil is rarer than Holo on the prints where it appears and shows up most often on premium and tournament-tier designs. Because there are fewer Foil prints overall, the supply is thin and prices sit high — frequently above the Holo of a comparable design.
Gold (Lenticular) — the rarest, tournament-tier finish
Gold, sometimes called Lenticular, is the top of the ladder. It uses a lenticular gold-foil layer that reads as a deep, gleaming metallic gold, and it only appears on the most exclusive content — Champions stickers from major tournaments and certain signed autograph prints. Gold is pulled at the lowest odds of any finish, so the number in circulation is tiny relative to demand. That combination makes Gold the most expensive finish tier by a wide margin and a genuine collector's trophy.
Tournament finishes vs capsule finishes
It helps to split stickers into two worlds. Capsule finishes — the artist and community capsules — typically run Paper, Glitter, Holo and sometimes Foil, with Holo as the headline tier. Tournament finishes from Majors add the elite layers: team and player stickers appear as Paper, Holo, Foil and, at the very top, Gold for Champions and autograph prints. Event-tied scarcity is why a tournament Gold or Foil can dwarf a capsule Holo in price, even when the capsule design is more famous. The most expensive stickers in the game almost all come from this tournament tier — see our roundup of the most valuable CS2 stickers.
How to tell finishes apart on a listing
Every marketplace listing tags the finish explicitly in the sticker's name — you'll see "(Holo)", "(Foil)", "(Gold)" or "(Glitter)" appended, and Paper carries no suffix at all. Never compare two prices without checking that tag first, because the "same" sticker across finishes is really four or five different items on completely separate price scales. When in doubt, the in-game preview shows the light behaviour: a rainbow wash means Holo, a flat metallic sheen means Foil, and a rich gold mirror means Gold.
Browse the full finish range on our stickers catalog, where each entry lists its finish alongside a live multi-market price grid built from our own in-house algorithm across 41 marketplaces, so you can see exactly how much a finish step adds. If you're planning a build, pair this with our sticker crafts explained guide and the capsule-side economics in our sticker capsules investment guide.
Finishes, in one sentence
Paper is the cheap baseline, Glitter adds sparkle, Holo brings the rainbow shimmer crafters love, Foil the metallic mirror, and Gold the rarest tournament trophy — so always read the finish tag before you judge a sticker's price. For the rest of the vocabulary, see our CS2 skins glossary.