Cologne 2026 Ranked Series Stickers Are On Sale, and the Shop Shuts 29 September

Valve put the Cologne 2026 Ranked Series stickers on sale in the 29 July CS2 update. The Major Shop closes on 29 September. Write that date down if you want any of them at store price.

What separates Ranked Series from Event Series

The final placement is stamped into the sticker. Each one carries the team’s finishing number in the bottom right corner, so a 2 sits where a 28 sits on someone else’s, and the champion gets the word CHAMPION across the top instead of a number.

The frame is a stained-glass design with the Cologne 2026 wordmark along the bottom, and the finish varies between a gold treatment and a lighter holographic one. Team colours run through the glass panels, so the stickers read as a set while staying distinguishable at a glance.

For collectors that is the whole appeal. An Event Series sticker tells you a team turned up. A Ranked Series sticker tells you they finished 17th, and it will still say so in five years.

Why they cost less

Valve explained the reasoning rather than leaving people to guess, which is not always how sticker pricing gets communicated.

The original dynamic pricing model was built to measure relative interest in players and teams. It measured that interest fine. It just did not turn it into sensible prices. So Valve kept the same price relationship between players and teams that the Event Series used, then dropped the overall level.

The gap between a top-placing team’s sticker and a bottom-half team’s sticker should look roughly familiar. The absolute numbers sit lower.

Where the money goes

Half the royalties from Cologne 2026 Shop items go to the players, the teams and the tournament organiser. That split has applied to Major shop items for several years and it applies here unchanged.

What happens after 29 September

Supply freezes at whatever players bought, and pricing moves to the community market.

We are not going to tell you which way individual stickers go. Post-shop sticker prices depend on how much a specific team’s fanbase kept buying, how much got applied to weapons rather than held, and how the wider market is behaving that month. Anyone giving you a confident forecast three weeks out is guessing.

The rest of the update

The same patch closed a VACnet bypass, updated Boulder, Fachwerk and Shelter to their latest Workshop versions, fixed scripts failing to load in tools mode, and repaired Collection Catalog XP claims for The Dead Hand Collection.

Valve’s own post is on the official Counter-Strike site.