CUTIECAST

The first steps here is preparing your backpack. Unfortunately, the standard backpack only has 300 slots. So unless you were to completely empty out your backpack of all the untradable achievement items, weapons, and hats that you already have; chances are you're not going to have enough backpack space to facilitate the volume of items that you will need to accumulate.

The only way (currently) to alleviate this is to purchase backpack expanders. You can either buy them straight from the Mann Co. Store, from the Community Market, or from either of the recently launched “cash shops” that have sprung up (Hexide and TF2Shop).

So now you’ve got enough space for all the Secret Saxtons and Dueling Minigames that will be clogging up your inventory for the next few days. What is the best method of obtaining these items (in regards to time and money)?

Well, to start: Nothing should be bought from the Mann Co store unless you are buying stamps. The gifts and duels can be traded for easily. Even if you want to use money to sidestep the lengthy scavenging process, better deals are everywhere. Most gifts sell for 1 - 2 reclaimed (0.33 - 0.66), and most duels 1 reclaimed (0.33).

You’ll want to set up posts on TF2Outpost, r/TF2Trade, and Bazaar.tf (or any other trading site/community) indicating that you are buying Minigames and Saxtons in bulk. 

Should I buy the items or trade for them?

All I can recommend here is to whatever suits you the most. If money is not a huge deal, go out and drop $15 on 90 individual dueling mini-games and save yourself the headache of having to deal with trading them one at a time. If money is tight, and you don’t care very much about your timetable; Just sit back and wait for trades to roll in. Make a bookmark folder with saved searches for people who have Saxtons and Minigames in their trade. It will take longer, but in the long run will be much cheaper than the alternate. 

If you value your time more than your pocket change, I would recommend you to once again check Hexide and TF2Shop to see if they have Minigames or Secret Saxtons in stock. The price can range from $0.14 each to upwards of $0.28. If you can’t find a price you want to pay, post on some trading boards that specialize in cash trades (like SourceOP or TF2-Trader). Finding a seller who will be willing to sell you the items you need in bulk is difficult, and more often than not the sellers with bulk collections are only interested in quoting outrageous prices to “make up for the inconvenience” of not having to buy each item piecemeal. Collecting stock is arguably the most time consuming and frustrating part of this whole process. 

All three hat timers reset at 12:00am GMT. The hats are rewarded, and taken away at 12am GMT. Make sure to check what time 12am GMT is in relation to your own timezone, or you might end up splitting your gift / duel total across 2 days.

  The average number of duels needed to be awarded the Dueler is 400 (80 full 5-use minigames).

The average number of gifts needed to be awarded the Gifting Man From Gifting Land is 90.

The average  number of stamps needed to be awarded the Philateler is 10. ***

*** These numbers were obtained after interviewing more than 50 of the previous owners. These numbers are not meant to be used as anything other than a VERY broad look at the general number of items needed to be rewarded each hat. Please do not give exactly 90 gifts and angrily message me that you did not receive a hat. Thank you.

Ok, you have all your items. You’re convinced that you've accumulated enough items to beat every single individual tf2 player’s daily total. So, what first? 

I would recommend starting with your duels, then finding a good server and giving away all your gifts, then at the very end buying your stamps.

Step 1: Duels

Download the map Achievement_Duel. Either use Sandboxie to run dual TF2 clients or sucker one of your friends into letting you kill them 400 times. If you need help setting up a server, there are a ton of guides to help you out. Set aside about 2 hours to get your duels done. You’ll be looking at about an average of 200 duels per hour (dph). You might be able to squeeze out 300-350dph if you’re focused and get the rhythm down quickly.

Step 2: Gifts

You might want to pick a server in advance that you know will have a full 23 people on it if you're using Piles o' Gifts. Keep in mind, that even if you use the P.o.G. on a 32 player server, only the first 23 people to connect to the server will receive gifts. If you’re in a particularly miserly mood, you could stock up on Secret Saxtons and spam gift them all to an alt account in a private server. You might end up walking away with a nice little stash of hats, weapons, and miscs!

Step 3: Stamps

This one is either the easiest hat, or the trickiest depending on your financial situation. There’s pretty much no way around spending money in the Mann Co. Store. If you don’t have a debt/credit card you can use cash to purchase pre-paid Visas and Steam Gift Cards. 

Step 4: Wait

Wait until 12:00am GMT to see if you outshined all your fellow hat-loving comrades!

This whole crazy idea was put together almost solely by Cassette (SALAD.babz). I run a gaming YouTube channel which should totally check out ;)! I would absolutely love your feedback on this guide, or any of the other guides (on YouTube or Steam) that I put out. 

130 Secret Saxtons ($3.00)

3 Piles o’ Gifts ($0.00)

90 Dueling Mini Games ($6.00)

2 Stamp Booklets ($30.00)

Hexide Shop

TF2Shop

TF2Outpost

r/TF2Trade

Bazaar.tf

Backpack.tf

Introduction

My name is Cassette, and I’m a casual trader. I’ve been trading since the introduction of the system back in 2010. I’m far from an expert, but I would like to share some general insight that I have gleaned from my time trading with all of you hat wearing people.

A lot of what I’ll be covering in this episode will likely be common knowledge to some of the more experienced tf2 players, but bear with me. We’ll eventually get into some more advanced trading concepts and techniques in later episodes. In this episode I’m going to be starting from the very basics of items and trading.

Getting Started

So, you just registered your steam account, and downloaded Team Fortress 2. You’re going to be able to start playing immediately without spending any money thanks to the Free to Play update. Well, unfortunately the first step in owning one of these shiny beacons of disposable income is upgrading your account to premium. Upgrading your account to premium will allow you to trade with other people, increase your backpack size and item drop rate, and allow you to unlock all crafting blueprints. Upgrading your account is more or less the only required step in this whole series of videos. If you want to learn how to trade up to an unusual, you’re going to have to be able to trade.

You can upgrade your account in a variety of ways:

You can purchase $5 of stuff from the Mann Co store using either a credit card or a Steam gift card. You can receive an “Upgrade to Premium Gift” from a generous steam friend. Or you might already have premium if you at any point bought the Orange Box on PC. 

If you decide to spend money on the Mann Co. store I would personally advise that you buy 2 keys and leave it at that. It meets the minimum, and keys are always in high demand and can be traded almost immediately to jump start you into the trading scene. Another great idea is to purchase an "Upgrade to Premium" item, and sell that for 3 keys, or save it for an alt or friend's account.

A word of caution: Never buy weapons. Ever. 

Even if you need an item immediately for a round of MVM, most weapons have a “try it out” button, which allows you to receive the weapon for a 48 hour trial. Weapons have the lowest resale value of all the items on the Mann co store. To put it in perspective, you can buy a key for $2.50 (or less from the community market) or a weapon for $2.50. The key currently is valued at 2.33 refined, which is worth roughly around 20+ weapons when bought at 1 scrap each. So, for the price of one bought weapon from the Mann Co store, you could have 20 instead. Yep.

Item Drops

So now that you’re a premium member, lets talk items. The main source of items in Team Fortress comes from a random item drop system. It rewards you with random items at random intervals while you play. It could be anything from a crate, to a weapon, to even a hat. There is a weekly cap on the amount of items you can receive, but it requires a significant amount of playtime that can sometimes be upwards of 10 hours a week. What many people in order to meet this cap without having to dedicate that kind of time is something called “idling”. Idling is when you join a special server to do nothing but sit and die over and over to simulate game time in order to maximize the number of items you receive per week. 

But let just assume that you don’t want to go that far, and you’re content with the rate at which you are currently finding items. Lets take a quick look at the types of items that can drop. 

The most commonly dropped items are called crates. Crates are an item that are more or less useless unless you’re willing to buy or trade for a key. They usually contain strange weapons, strange parts, hats, and are more importantly the only way to find unusual hats without trading. Crates can be kept or sold on the community marketplace if so desired. They are numbered by series, and each series of crates has a set list list of items that it contains. Every few months (usually alongside content updates) a new series of crates will be released, and the previous series will be discontinued. A fairly common practice is to save crates that you don’t to use, as their value will sometimes appreciate if they contain popular items with high demand.

The other type of item that you’ll see dropping in abundance are weapons. Most weapons are usually sold and bought very cheaply, usually around 1 scrap. Like with all items there are some exceptions to this general rule that usually correlate to simple concepts such as rarity, novelty, and basic supply and demand.Weapons are used in crafting to craft metal which is then in turn traded or crafted into hats. But we’ll touch more on that later. 

The more uncommon (and valuable) drops are hats and salvaged crates. 

Hats themselves can be worth anywhere from 1.33 refined (1 refined and one reclaimed) to upwards of 4 keys (about 11 refined). Hat values can be determined on the fly by checking some of the various community generated spreadsheets such as tf2spreadsheet, and backpack.tf. The very lowest a hat will ever be worth is 1.33 refined. Even the ugliest looking hats are used for crafting other hats, and are called “craft hats”.

Salvaged crates are the most sought after droppable item, and arguably the rarest. It can sell for []upwards of 8 keys and is indisputably the most valuable dropped item. They require a key to open and contain rare strange weapons that sell for high prices. Salvage crates, like regular crates appreciate over time. The previous series of salvaged crate are currently bought and sold for around 26 keys, compare that to before they were discontinued and worth around 7 to 8.