M4A4 | Howl

M4A4 | Howl released May 1, 2014 as part of the Huntsman Weapon Case, in CS:GO's "The Hunt Begins" update. It launched as a Covert-tier finish with both a StatTrak™ and a Souvenir edition.

Six weeks later, a DMCA copyright claim revealed the submitted wolf artwork wasn't the credited contributors' own work. Valve banned both artists from Steam, removed their share of the proceeds, and replaced the design with an alternative of its own — created specifically for it, and for it alone, a brand-new rarity tier called Contraband, and pulled the item from the Case's drop pool for good.

As a finish, Howl is applied to the M4A4 — the Counter-Terrorists' standard assault rifle, with a larger magazine than the M4A1-S — and carries a gold-amber rarity color (#e4ae39) that no other weapon skin in CS2 uses. Its artwork, the replacement design the CS:GO team commissioned after the original was pulled, shows a snarling red-and-black wolf's head across the receiver and handguard.

That Contraband classification sits above even Covert — Howl is the only weapon skin in Counter-Strike history to carry it, a one-off tier that exists purely because of this one incident, not a rank other skins ever get assigned to.

Howl ships in four of the five wear conditions — Factory New, Minimal Wear, Field-Tested, and Well-Worn — with its float capped at 0.40, so no Battle-Scarred copies were ever produced.

Factory New copies (below 0.07 float) show the wolf artwork at its sharpest, while Field-Tested and Well-Worn make up the widest, most commonly traded slice of Howl's narrow float window.

Howl can no longer be pulled from the Huntsman Weapon Case at all — it left the drop pool permanently in June 2014. Trading and the Steam Community Market are the only ways to acquire one today, which is why this site leaves it out of the Case's own tile grid and skin count, even though the Case remains its real historical source.

Because it hasn't been part of any live drop pool in over a decade, Valve has never published — and, per its own announcement that the item "will never be produced again," never will publish — an official pull percentage for it. Any specific odds quoted for Howl elsewhere aren't based on real, current drop data.

There's both a StatTrak™ and a Souvenir edition of Howl, alongside the Normal version — the same three-way split its original Covert release launched with before the 2014 replacement.

There's no separate phase or pattern family to track — Howl is a single fixed design across every wear condition it ships in.

As the only Contraband-rarity weapon skin in Counter-Strike, Howl is one of the most recognized names in the game's skin economy — its market price regularly sits among the highest of any weapon finish, StatTrak or not, precisely because supply can never grow again.

Its StatTrak™ and Souvenir editions trade at a further premium over the Normal version, the same pattern seen across most CS2 skins with those variants — but on Howl, all three already sit at a price tier very few other weapon skins reach.

Howl's core definition has been fixed since June 2014 — no further rarity change, no reissue, and, per Valve's own announcement, it will never be produced again. The one real transformation since was Counter-Strike 2's 2023 Source 2 relaunch, which carried the replacement artwork, wear range, and now-historical Case link over unchanged.

Howl is the only Contraband-rarity skin ever created for a weapon in Counter-Strike — no other skin, past or present, shares that rarity tier. The Huntsman Weapon Case's live drop pool instead tops out at AK-47 | Vulcan and M4A4 | Desert-Strike, both Covert — the same tier Howl itself briefly held before the incident.

This is one of 52 M4A4 skins currently listed on the site, spanning rarity tiers from Contraband down to Consumer Grade.