Ten M4A1-S Knights will turn into an AWP Dragon Lore every single time. The recipe is public, the game guarantees the result, and at today’s prices it throws away more than half of what you put in. As of September 24, 2026, ten Factory New Knights cost $25,712.10. The best Dragon Lore they can produce, a Factory New one, sells for $11,410.37.
That gap decides where new Dragon Lores come from.
Ten Knights, one possible result
A trade-up contract takes ten skins of the same rarity and returns one skin a tier higher. The result is drawn from the collections the inputs came from, weighted by how many inputs each collection supplied. Put in ten skins from a single collection and you get a skin from that collection.
The Dragon Lore belongs to the Cobblestone Collection, a set of 15 skins released on July 1, 2014, alongside Operation Breakout. It is the collection’s only Covert skin. The M4A1-S Knight sits one tier below it at Classified, so ten Knights leave the game exactly one thing to hand back.
The collection was never in a regular case. Its skins reached players two ways: as in-game drops during Operation Breakout, and through ten Cobblestone souvenir packages that viewers earned at Majors, from ESL One Cologne 2014 to the 2018 Boston Major. Neither is a source of regular Dragon Lores today. The drops stopped, and the packages only ever gave out Souvenir copies. A brand-new regular one can only come out of a trade-up.
The math at today’s prices
Here is what the same $25,712.10 in Knights buys, depending on the wear of the Dragon Lore that comes out.
| Dragon Lore wear | Price | Share of the $25,712.10 input |
|---|---|---|
| Factory New | $11,410.37 | 44.4% |
| Minimal Wear | $9,438.69 | 36.7% |
| Field-Tested | $6,217.73 | 24.2% |
| Well-Worn | $5,445.00 | 21.2% |
| Battle-Scarred | $4,645.48 | 18.1% |
Prices are from Skins Wiki as of September 24, 2026, and they move daily. The current AWP Dragon Lore price for each wear, Souvenir copies included, is on its item page there.
To break even, a Knight would have to cost a tenth of a Factory New Dragon Lore, about $1,141, and right now it costs 2.25 times that.
The recipe used to be far cheaper in absolute terms. In January 2015, a Steam Community forum user priced the whole contract at about €1,700, with Knights at €170 each.
Factory New is no longer part of the deal
A trade-up result gets its wear from the wear of the inputs. For years the game took the average input float and stretched it across the output skin’s range. Knights only exist between 0.00 and 0.10, while a Dragon Lore spans 0.00 to 0.70, so the result always landed below 0.07. Every Dragon Lore made from ten Knights came out Factory New.
Valve has since changed that calculation, and none of its patch notes mention it. The game now scales each input’s float to that skin’s own range before averaging. For Knights, that boils down to one rule: the Dragon Lore’s float equals seven times the Knights’ average, ten times what the old formula gave.
The results are blunt. Ten Knights averaging 0.03 produce a Dragon Lore at 0.21, which is Field-Tested and worth $6,217.73. Minimal Wear Knights start at 0.07, and ten of them return 0.49 or worse. That’s Battle-Scarred. At $3,750 per Minimal Wear Knight, you’d pay $37,500 for a $4,645.48 skin.
A Factory New result now needs Knights that average under 0.01. Collectors pay extra for Dragon Lores below 0.01, and getting one of those from a contract would take Knights averaging under 0.0015.
May 2026 opened a second door
On May 22, 2026, Valve let Souvenir items into trade-up contracts. According to the update notes, a Souvenir input loses its Souvenir attributes, and the contract returns a normal item one tier up.
For the Dragon Lore, that adds Souvenir Knights to the recipe. They don’t make it cheaper. The cheapest Souvenir Knight on Skins Wiki costs $2,796.32, so ten of them come to $27,963.20. That’s more than the regular route, and the contract wipes out the Souvenir status those Knights were collected for.
Some price guides describe the trade-up as costing roughly what a Dragon Lore sells for. At current prices it costs more than twice as much.
Regular copies are capped, Souvenir ones still trickle in
A regular Dragon Lore can only be created by a contract that loses money at every wear in the table above. The copies that exist now are, in practice, the ones the market has to work with.
Souvenir copies are different. Valve stopped issuing Cobblestone packages after Boston 2018, but unopened ones still trade. On September 24, 2026, eight of the ten editions were listed on the Steam Community Market. The cheapest listings ran from $906.59 for a Boston 2018 Cobblestone Souvenir Package to $1,265.00 for MLG Columbus 2016. Every package someone opens is another chance at a Souvenir Dragon Lore.
The number to watch
If the Dragon Lore ever climbed above the cost of ten Knights, traders would craft new copies and sell them until the price came back down. That ceiling sits at $25,712 or more today, over twice the market price, so it has no say in where the Dragon Lore trades now.
The Knight price is the figure that could change this. If it falls below a tenth of a Factory New Dragon Lore, about $1,141 today, the contract starts to pay, as long as the Knights are clean enough to keep the result Factory New. Until then, buying a Dragon Lore outright costs less than half of what making one does.