The AK-47 | Wild Lotus is the Covert skin of the St. Marc Collection, a set of 18 tropical finishes that Valve released with Operation Shattered Web in November 2019. The collection was an operation reward rather than a case, so once the operation closed, the only way to create a new Wild Lotus was a trade-up contract.
Where the St. Marc Collection came from
Operation Shattered Web launched on November 18, 2019 with a battle pass: weekly missions earned stars, and stars moved you along a fixed reward track. The Counter-Strike Wiki's copy of the track lists the St. Marc Collection at 22, 46 and 88 stars, alongside the Norse and Canals collections, Shattered Web Cases, stickers, graffiti and agents. Missions could also reward a random skin from the operation's collections. The Wiki gives March 30, 2020 as the operation's official end. The AWP Gungnir article covers the operation's reward system in more detail.
Valve said the three new collections featured designs from community artists, and its operation page credits the St. Marc Collection to Chemical Alia. Dexerto, covering the update, called her a video game artist and described St. Marc as "a collection of tropical-themed skins".
The Wild Lotus
The in-game description is unusually specific: "A custom paint job of an orange lotus has been hand painted over a green base." The flavour text is "Muck or nettles". Valve's files list it as a custom paint job, the style its Weapon Finishes Guide describes as a full-colour image laid along the gun's own texture layout, wearing straight through to the bare gun.
The rifle covers the full float range from 0.00 to 1.00, so every wear from Factory New to Battle-Scarred exists. It is the collection's only Covert, the top weapon grade.
Its partner one tier down is the MP9 | Wild Lily, "a custom paint job of a blue lily" hand painted over a purple base, with the flavour text "Stop and smell the cordite". The two share a painted-flower style that sets them apart from the patterned skins in the rest of the set.
The St. Marc Collection by rarity
Valve's item definitions rank the 18 finishes like this:
| Rarity | Skins |
|---|---|
| Covert | AK-47 Wild Lotus |
| Classified | MP9 Wild Lily |
| Restricted | AUG Midnight Lily, Glock-18 Synth Leaf, SSG 08 Sea Calico |
| Mil-Spec | FAMAS Sundown, Five-SeveN Crimson Blossom, MP7 Teal Blossom, UMP-45 Day Lily |
| Industrial | M4A4 Dark Blossom, P90 Sunset Lily, Tec-9 Rust Leaf, XM1014 Banana Leaf |
| Consumer | M249 Jungle, MAC-10 Surfwood, MP5-SD Bamboo Garden, PP-Bizon Seabird, Sawed-Off Jungle Thicket |
Lilies, rose buds, palm fronds and leaves repeat across the tiers. Three lily skins share the flavour text "While beautiful, lilies are most often associated with death", and the FAMAS Sundown, purple palm fronds over a blue and pink camo, simply says "A E S T H E T I C". The AUG Midnight Lily uses "pearlescent, color changing paint", the coating Valve added to the game on the same day the operation launched.
StatTrak, Souvenir and trade-ups
Because the St. Marc Collection never came in a case, none of its skins exist in StatTrak, and no souvenir package ever held them. Since May 2026 the Souvenir-O-Matic, introduced for the IEM Cologne 2026 Major, has let players convert a normal weapon they own into a Souvenir with four gold stickers from a completed match, so a Souvenir Wild Lotus is always a converted normal copy.
Trade-ups are the only way to make a new one. A trade-up contract exchanges ten skins of one rarity for one of the next rarity from the collection of one of the inputs. St. Marc has exactly one Classified and one Covert, so ten MP9 Wild Lilies can only become a Wild Lotus. Ten St. Marc Restricted skins, any mix of Midnight Lily, Synth Leaf and Sea Calico, can only become a Wild Lily. Mixing in other collections only gives a partial chance, and our trade-up guide explains how the result's float is worked out.
The October 2025 rule that turns five Covert skins into a knife or gloves does not apply here. That contract draws from the knives and gloves of an input's collection, and St. Marc has none.
The 2023 sticker sale
The best-documented Wild Lotus sale is as much about stickers as the rifle. On March 13, 2023, a Factory New Wild Lotus carrying four Reason Gaming Holo stickers from the 2014 Katowice Major sold on a third-party marketplace for ¥1,095,000, about $160,000, according to PC Gamer, which picked the story up from Dexerto. PC Gamer noted that the stickers alone were worth roughly $40,000 each at the time and put the number of Wild Lotus rifles in existence at fewer than 3,000.
The Katowice 2014 stickers article explains why those stickers carry such a premium.
Checking a Wild Lotus before you buy
- Separate the rifle from its stickers. A copy with rare stickers is priced on both, so check which stickers they are and how scraped they look.
- Read the float. The full 0.00 to 1.00 range means two Field-Tested copies can look quite different.
- Check for gold Cologne 2026 stickers. They mark a converted Souvenir.
- Ignore StatTrak claims. No StatTrak Wild Lotus exists.
On CS2Sell, the collection, float range and sticker filters on Buy narrow St. Marc listings to the copies you want.
Sources
- Release Notes for 11/18/2019 — Counter-Strike blog
- Operation Shattered Web — Counter-Strike
- Operation Shattered Web — Counter-Strike Wiki
- First look at new CSGO skins from Operation Shattered Web update — Dexerto
- items_game.txt — GameTracking-CS2 on GitHub
- Someone dropped over $150K on a CS:GO gun skin — PC Gamer
- Trade Up Contract — Counter-Strike Wiki
- How to Use the CS2 Souvenir-O-Matic — Dot Esports
