How do spells work?

[nimbus trade.tf]

Hey there. I recently got into the unusual trading scene (brokering for a friend) and while on Vatican/Firepowered. I saw a bunch of people selling spelled items. I dont really know much about spells other than they were available in the Scream Fortress updates and can be applied to cosmetics/weapons. Any tips would be appreciated as I currently do not know how to price check and I do think the concept of spells is cool.

[FP jh34ghu43gu]

They are no longer available (since 2016?) so no new spelled items can be created which is what draws people to them similar to old Halloween effects since they can make mini-monopolies on 1o1 combinations and drive the price up.

 

On unusuals added price is minimal if at all, usually only worth more for the footprint spells.

 

On graded items they are worth a lot because they are considered post-life items; spells only dropped in early Halloween events (<2014?) however if you put the spells in an alt account and did not open the backpack after the event you could still keep them and they could be used up to 2016(?) during the events. So a few tiered items got spelled because of this, the actual spells were still tradeable at this time and were going upwards of 60 keys each so if you didn't have a stash from years prior it was hella expensive to put these on. After that event valve trade locked them and deleted them if you login to the account with them even during events. You can still see some in some player's alts but they are now worthless obviously.

 

On other items price depends on rarity (See tf2 tools - note these are not always accurate but give a rough idea for example it says there are 9 spelled collector handshakes but there is actually 17), if there is two (the max spells allowed per item), and how desirable the spell is:

Exo < pumpkin bombs/Halloween fire for weapons

Footprints > Color effects > voices for hats, their are tiers for the footprints/colors but idk them. I prefer violet colors on stuff.

Sniper Noob of FirePowered has a spell discord with a bot to track community sales you can use to see what items have sold for. Generally on weapons exo will add 1-3 keys, the other 2 spells will add 2-5 keys and both of them will add 5-10 keys. Notable exceptions for skins as discussed in previous point and aussies, especially gpan where double spells adds a couple grand to the price (Info might be outdated, I haven't kept up with spells for over a year). The phlog with fire spell and cow mangler with pumpkin bombs are also generally higher because the halloween fire changes the phlog particles and iirc pumpkin bomb doesn't work quite right with cow mangler. Hats have too many variables for me to try and explain pricing on that beyond which of the types of spells are more valuable and voices usually only adds 1-3 keys depending on how many classes the hat is for and if it's a misc or not. There are some spelled unpaintables that are worth a hefty sum.

 

Spells are only visible in Halloween mode so about once a month (full moon) and 3ish weeks in October unless the community server has it enabled, most trade servers do. You can also cast an eternaween for 2 hours of it on a server which is about 13 cents right now. If you leave the game before the eternaween time finishes you will often keep it but it will go on a "cooldown" for a day or two. 10 of them will last me ~3 months using 1 about every 5th mvm match I play.

 

Spells sell slow in my experience so I tend to stay away from trading them for profit, only buying them on handshakes for my collection.

 

Someone please correct my dates if I'm wrong too lazy to lookup.

[Semper]

2 hours ago, FP jh34ghu43gu said:

They are no longer available (since 2016?) so no new spelled items can be created which is what draws people to them similar to old Halloween effects since they can make mini-monopolies on 1o1 combinations and drive the price up.

 

On unusuals added price is minimal if at all, usually only worth more for the footprint spells.

 

On graded items they are worth a lot because they are considered post-life items; spells only dropped in early Halloween events (<2014?) however if you put the spells in an alt account and did not open the backpack after the event you could still keep them and they could be used up to 2016(?) during the events. So a few tiered items got spelled because of this, the actual spells were still tradeable at this time and were going upwards of 60 keys each so if you didn't have a stash from years prior it was hella expensive to put these on. After that event valve trade locked them and deleted them if you login to the account with them even during events. You can still see some in some player's alts but they are now worthless obviously.

 

On other items price depends on rarity (See tf2 tools - note these are not always accurate but give a rough idea for example it says there are 9 spelled collector handshakes but there is actually 17), if there is two (the max spells allowed per item), and how desirable the spell is:

Exo < pumpkin bombs/Halloween fire for weapons

Footprints > Color effects > voices for hats, their are tiers for the footprints/colors but idk them. I prefer violet colors on stuff.

Sniper Noob of FirePowered has a spell discord with a bot to track community sales you can use to see what items have sold for. Generally on weapons exo will add 1-3 keys, the other 2 spells will add 2-5 keys and both of them will add 5-10 keys. Notable exceptions for skins as discussed in previous point and aussies, especially gpan where double spells adds a couple grand to the price (Info might be outdated, I haven't kept up with spells for over a year). The phlog with fire spell and cow mangler with pumpkin bombs are also generally higher because the halloween fire changes the phlog particles and iirc pumpkin bomb doesn't work quite right with cow mangler. Hats have too many variables for me to try and explain pricing on that beyond which of the types of spells are more valuable and voices usually only adds 1-3 keys depending on how many classes the hat is for and if it's a misc or not. There are some spelled unpaintables that are worth a hefty sum.

 

Spells are only visible in Halloween mode so about once a month (full moon) and 3ish weeks in October unless the community server has it enabled, most trade servers do. You can also cast an eternaween for 2 hours of it on a server which is about 13 cents right now. If you leave the game before the eternaween time finishes you will often keep it but it will go on a "cooldown" for a day or two. 10 of them will last me ~3 months using 1 about every 5th mvm match I play.

 

Spells sell slow in my experience so I tend to stay away from trading them for profit, only buying them on handshakes for my collection.

 

Someone please correct my dates if I'm wrong too lazy to lookup.

Spells first dropped in 2012, then were found as drops in 2013 as rewards, and were still applicable by 2014s event, evidence of their gradual increase in price can still be found on dead SCM links, before December 2014, die job vials were selling for around 6-7$.

Spells Were Officially Terminated on December 17th, 2015(Tough Break Update)

TF2Tools is Outdated and will more than likely never be updated(rip)I have hopes that someone will come along and purchase the site from Toxins one day.

I personally believe you can't put a price on Spelled Items, because 7/10 times people will pay that number eventually for something they want, the downside to having a pricing system for spelled items is people will just start to hoard stuff similiar to what Squirrelly and Others did in the past and when they all are released simultaneously the market for spells will crash again.

Rarity affects price in 90% of scenarios, anything past Scream Fortress 2014 is considered "post-life", since the last time spells dropped was scream fortress 2014, they had to be glitched onto items afterwards using exploits like setting yourself in offline mode so the spell wouldn't delete itself, but that was eventually patched(tough break update), there are a good amount of post-lifes but the farther you go into 2015's updates the rarer they become, only a handful of spelled items exist from 2015's Halloween Event aka Chromatic/Spectrum Catastrophic Companions, Chromatic sold for 1000 Keys last year, and the Spectrum Owner has declined 1200+ key offers.

As for Eternaweens, they have been removed from the drop system for Scream Fortress starting with 2019's, but the wiki does not say anything about this, so it is still unconfirmed at the time of this being written, if true, Eternaweens will become a commodity in the next few years unless valve does something new(highly unlikely)

Examples of Post-Lifes i've owned: 
this sold for 70 keys: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1771482747
Bought this for 35 keys: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2022663036
I sold this for 40 keys: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2022660069
I got this for 25 keys via SCM: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1741363303
This sold for 270-300 Keys in Mix: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1662952984
 

[nimbus trade.tf]

This clears a lot of confusion for me. Thank you FP jh34ghu43gu and Semper for this information.