A Stolen Wolf Became the Rarest Gun in Counter-Strike

"Great way to ruin my day, thank you for that."

That was CanisAlbus, a Finnish artist, on June 8, 2014, after he opened Steam and found his own painting on a gun. The piece was called "Aggression": a wolf, jaws open, framed in flame. Somebody had traced it onto the side of an M4A4 rifle in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and shipped it to millions of players. His DeviantArt handle means "white dog" in Latin. Nobody had asked him a thing.

He wrote a journal post that day, "Art theft in Steam / Counter-Strike," lined his painting up next to the in-game weapon, and filed a copyright complaint. He figured Valve would pull the item and that would be the end of it.

It was the opposite of the end.

The skin nobody was supposed to keep

The gun was the M4A4 | Howl. It started life in the Steam Workshop, where anyone can submit a weapon design and let the community vote it up. Two users, going by "Auzzii" and "sic," posted it under the name "Howling Dawn." More than 4,000 ratings later, Valve picked it up.

It went live on May 1, 2014, in an update called "The Hunt Begins," dropped into the Huntsman Weapon Case at Covert rarity, the red tier, the top of the normal ladder. For about five weeks it was just another expensive unbox, a good pull if you got lucky.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive on stage at ESL One Cologne in 2014, the year the Howl reached players. Credit: Tim Bartel. License: CC BY-SA 2.0.

Then CanisAlbus opened Steam.

Valve's fix made it worse (for scarcity, better)

Once the theft was confirmed, Valve moved hard. Auzzii and sic were permanently banned. Their cut of the proceeds was withheld. Valve had its own artists draw a fresh wolf-and-flame design from scratch, no tracing and no "Aggression," and pushed it out on June 11, 2014, three days after the artist's post.

Skyline Tower in Bellevue, Washington, on the left, where Valve has its offices. Credit: SounderBruce. License: CC BY-SA 2.0.

Then came the decision that mattered. Valve didn't reach into people's inventories and delete the Howls they already owned. It pulled the skin out of the Huntsman Case so no one could ever unbox another one, and it left the existing guns alone. Every Howl already in the wild stayed there. The tap was shut off with the sink still full.

And then Valve did something it has never done again. It invented a rarity tier for this one gun.

Contraband: a category of one

Above Covert red, Valve created Contraband, orange, sometimes called gold. The M4A4 | Howl is the only weapon skin in the entire history of CS:GO and CS2 to carry it. Not one other skin, before or since, has been Contraband. It's a rarity class with a population of one item type.

The color is basically a warning label. It tells you, right there in your inventory, that this thing has a criminal record.

Because the Howl was yanked from every drop pool, its supply can only shrink. Guns get deleted, accounts get lost, items sit in trade limbo, and none of it ever gets replaced. The number of Howls in existence is a ceiling that only ticks down. Skin-market sites commonly cite a figure of around 7,383 surviving Howls, though that number is repeated blog-to-blog rather than confirmed by Valve, so treat it as a ballpark, not gospel.

The price is the punchline

In late 2014, not long after the whole mess, a Factory New Howl was listed for about $270. A nice skin, priced like a nice skin.

By 2026 a plain Factory New Howl trades in the multiple thousands. Community skin trackers put it in the mid-to-high four figures, and the rarest StatTrak Factory New examples, the ones that count your kills, run into five figures. Same gun, same pixels a thief traced off DeviantArt, and on a like-for-like Factory New that's roughly thirty times what it cost in 2014. Valve's punishment turned every existing copy into a fossil of the crime.

That's the joke at the center of this. An act of art theft, the kind of thing that usually gets a design memory-holed, instead produced the single most exclusive item class in the game.

How far this stuff actually goes

If a five-figure rifle sounds unhinged, the Howl isn't even the ceiling for CS skins.

On June 5, 2024, a StatTrak Factory New AK-47 | Case Hardened with the blue-gem pattern #661 sold for over $1,000,000, reported as the most expensive CS2 skin ever. No stickers, no holos, just a bare rifle with the right pattern. It was crafted through a trade-up by a user known as "ROLF" and sold to a collector going by "Fourteen." (A separate, earlier #661, a non-StatTrak Minimal Wear plastered with four Titan holo stickers from Katowice 2014, went for roughly $400,000 back in 2023. Different gun, different sale. The two get mixed up constantly.)

Even that million-dollar AK might not be the most valuable item in Counter-Strike. That title tends to go to a knife: the Karambit | Case Hardened, Factory New, blue-gem pattern #387. Its owner is said to have turned down a seven-figure offer for it years ago, and community estimates have only climbed since. Said to, because that one lives mostly in secondhand retellings. The profile is private and the numbers wobble depending on who's telling it. The AK, at least, has a confirmed sale behind it.

Set the Howl next to those and it looks almost reasonable. A rifle that started as a stolen wolf, got its creator a dry one-line kiss-off on DeviantArt, and ended up wearing a color no other gun will ever be allowed to wear.

CanisAlbus wanted it taken down. Instead, Valve made it permanent.