A CS2 Souvenir is a weapon skin that came out of a Souvenir package. Those packages are tied to Major tournaments and hold skins from the map collection of the match you pick. Each Souvenir skin arrives with gold stickers for the event, the teams in the match and a player, as the Counter-Strike wiki's Souvenir page describes. Since 2019 packages come from Souvenir tokens bought in the game rather than random viewer drops, and at the IEM Cologne 2026 Major Valve added the Souvenir-O-Matic, which turns any weapon you own into a Souvenir with the gold stickers of a match and player you choose.
Souvenir items have a yellow name in the inventory and are never StatTrak; the two are separate qualities. Their skins come from map collections rather than cases, so some finishes only exist in a Souvenir version.
What makes a Souvenir skin valuable?
Three parts set the price. The base skin and its float value come first, just like a normal item. Then the sticker set matters, because stickers from a popular team, a famous player or an old event can be worth more than the skin. Finally the specific event and match add collector value, especially for the earliest Majors. Valve itself prices Souvenir-O-Matic crafts on the demand for the stickers and the rarity of the weapon, which is the same logic buyers use.
A Souvenir AWP | Dragon Lore from a well-known match with a top player's gold sticker is the classic example of a Souvenir that sells far above the same skin without the stickers.
Can Souvenir skins be used in trade-up contracts?
For most of the game's history they could not. Since the 22 May 2026 update, Souvenir skins can be selected in a trade-up alongside normal skins of the same rarity. Valve's note says all Souvenir attributes are removed from the inputs and the result is a single normal item one rarity higher. Trade-ups must still be all normal or all StatTrak, so Souvenir inputs go in with normal skins only.
That change gave cheap Souvenir skins a second use and moved their prices, so check current listings rather than older guides when valuing them. Applying or scraping the gold stickers is not possible; they are part of the item.