How should I go about briefing war paints?

[The_Mo1e]

I’m just wondering about if a certain weapon a war paint is on maters that much in the price. Or if I just should leave them be or if some paints and weapons or affect have synergies together to price more than the sum of its parts?

[Strife Hale]

Warpaints always have more value than you applying them on a weapon. They will loose value if you use them. It's quite similar to the strange parts or paints. There's no such thing as certain weapons have more value but a few of them are favorable just because of the weapon wear(I mean like FN, WW) and skin matching. A weapon skin isn't worth than a warpaint.

[awsommv]

Before, I used to always use Mp for pricing skins because I would resell there, but now that mp is kill thats not really an option anymore. I would suggest using scm now to price things as mannco barely has any skins and not a large selection so odds are they wont even have the skin in stock or recorded a sale. whenever I go price checking skins, I will look at how much the unapplied war paints cost and how much they have sold for, then similar skins with maybe a different weapon, killstreak, festivized, ect. It is always good to look at as much as possible since you might miss that a festivized version is selling for the same and non festivized or vice versa. Additionally festivizers don't add too much, typically 10-20ref to an item, of course depending on popularity and competition.

 

For example: the aqua marine rl
Since this is a skin there will be no unapplied war paint to look at.

We search strange aqua to see all the current listings on scm
https://steamcommunity.com/market/search?q=strange+aqua#p1_price_asc
MW is selling for .69 with sales around .75
Festivized MW is a dollar more expensive so we can disregard that. 
All the wears below MW is cheaper (FT WW BS) and festivized FT is 1.5 so we can disregard that as well.

Now we search for killstreaks

https://steamcommunity.com/market/search?q=killstreak+strange+aqua#p1_price_asc

https://steamcommunity.com/market/listings/440/Strange Killstreak Aqua Marine Rocket Launcher (Minimal Wear)

That is your item in question with sellers at 2.21 and buyers 1.55 with sales around 2.29 to 2.5ish 
We can see there are 2 sellers at 2.21 and another at 2.36 so we know now that we cant go directly off past sales.

 

Now looking at the bigger picture, we see that festivized ks FT is at 2, WW is higher so disregard, and ft and ww at 1.8-2 

We also see festivized ks MW at around 2.5 with most sales around 2.4

If regular strange MW is at .7 and ks lit is around 1.4 that means it would cost 2.1 to craft.
So 2.2 isnt too far off of the cheaper and worse wears (1.8-2) but only slightly under the festivized version and not too much cheaper than crafting cost.

Well what do we do here? It safe to say an estimate of 1.8-2 since worse wears are below that and buyers at 1.55.

Since this is scm we can estimate that this is approximately .8-.9key including 13% scm tax and varying price of keys

 

Now does this mean it is worth .8-.9k nd you should buy for that? NO. Skins can be very hit or miss (seehttps://marketplace.tf/items/tf2/200;15;w1;pk304;festive https://marketplace.tf/items/tf2/200;15;w1;pk304 had this since june ish) Skins can sell 5 minutes after you list them, or take months to sell. It all what the buyer wants to pay. This is usually why I buy skins at 50% or less of what I think I can sell them for because of the risk of not being able to sell and such. Now, this isnt always the case, since some skins are much more popular than others, for example your plaid scatter. Very popular skin, popular weapon so I would imagine it would be pretty easy to sell. On the other hand, something like a Strange killstreak alpine loch n load will be harder to sell since its a more expensive and niche item with a mediocre and not really sough after weapon.

 

tldr Look at all listings, dont pay a lot for stuff that isnt as popular.

 

 

copypasted from here 

 

 

[RockSolidWood]

Its hard to decipher, but usually stock weapons/ direct upgrades to stock (considered to be panic attack etc) seem to hold a better value than niche items, I.E, the winger. Very few skins have better value at lower wears, being that of the dragon slayer paints, as they're getting quite rare at lower wears. Certain warpaints also have some different varities and generation within the code of the skin, such as the macaw masked, or leopard/tiger buffed paints with different color types, such as fades, whites, etc. I find them quite cool but don't collect them like I used to.