Call to Arms-ory: Top 10 Pop Art and Cryptids Stickers on the Steam Workshop, from a 1999 Mixtape to a Cryptid in the Mirror
Submissions for the second Call to Arms-ory are still landing on the Workshop, and enough has turned up since our first two roundups to justify another look. The deadline is closing in, which is usually when the strongest entries go live.
The two themes are living very different lives, though. Pop Art is crowded: the brief is easy to read, the barrier to entry is low, and the competition is enormous. Cryptids is the reverse — submissions are thin on the ground, and almost any decent piece there is automatically part of the conversation about the final capsule. Splitting them into separate articles a second time didn’t make much sense, so we’ve taken five from each, all of it posted since our previous pieces.
Pop Art
Sticker | Rewind (Lenticular)
- by yavor.rusev
An acid-green cassette labeled MIXTAPE COUNTER STRIKE 2, with Summer Hits ’99 scrawled across it by hand and a pencil pushed into the spool. The lenticular does exactly what it should: shift the angle and the pencil turns, winding the tape along with it.
The date isn’t decoration. The artist spells it out — June 19, 1999, the day the Counter-Strike beta went live — and dedicates the sticker to those late nights at the local computer club. It’s a double hit: the personal history of the game, and the heart of the brief. A cassette with a handwritten label is mass culture in its purest form, a cheap mass-produced object that everybody customized into something of their own.
And then there’s the mechanic itself. Winding a tape with a pencil either needs no explanation at all or no explanation will help. It works as an age filter, and half the charm sits right there.
Sticker | The Observer (Lenticular)
- by Hrenitraizer
Classic aviators with a palm tree and the yellow walls of Mirage’s A site reflected in the lenses. The artist makes no secret of the motivation: fans of the map should be able to carry a piece of it around with them.
The more interesting part is how it’s meant to be used. Several placement options went up alongside the submission, and that’s where it stops being a picture and becomes a tool — the same sticker will sit on a huge range of finishes, and how far it goes is down to your own imagination.
CS2 has a decent number of stickers in this category already, but demand from the crafting crowd never really drops off. And mirrored shades with a sunset in them are lifted straight out of eighties advertising and album art, so the brief is covered too.
Sticker | Keep On Running (Lenticular)
- by bluete fiesta
A pixelated green figure with purple wings sprinting forward, keep on running spelled out beside him in thick graffiti lettering. The lenticular turns the sticker into an animation: turn the weapon and his legs start working.
Blunt approach, and that’s the strength of it. Pixel art is the same story as the halftone dot in classic pop art — a technical limitation that culture put up with, then appropriated and turned into a style. The artist has simply picked up the modern version of that logic.
Sticker | Vertigo (Glitter)
- by OCELLOTH
A girl in blue and red sitting on a stack of construction crates, with Vertigo’s shed and wooden walkways behind her. The look is sixties romance comic: heavy outlines, flat fills, chin propped on one hand. The glitter layer gives the background exactly the gloss these stickers get bought for.
The real trick is in the scraping. The layers are built so that the construction backdrop goes first and the girl stays — after which she can be dropped anywhere you like: another finish, a composition with neighboring stickers, any craft that needs a character with no background attached.
That’s another entry in recent waves designed for several states at once, and we’ll say what we always say about those: we’d like to see far more of it.
Sticker | POP ART * FRAGMENTS
- by kadzor
The only slot here that isn’t a single sticker but an entire batch. The artist has put up more than a dozen pieces in one visual language: a smoke grenade in clouds of pink, screaming wide-eyed faces, LOVE and KILL typography, a rooster, lips, skulls — all acid colors, thick outlines and halftone.
The value is in the volume and the coherence. A sticker capsule isn’t ten random images, it’s a set that has to read as one thing, and normally Valve assembles that coherence by hand from the work of different artists. Here it arrives pre-assembled: any five of these would sit in a capsule together without a single adjustment.
Individual pieces are open to argument on execution, but with that many submissions in a single style, the odds of landing in the game are simply better than they are for any one-off entry. At least one of them, we’d wager, ends up in the final set.
Cryptids
Sticker | Flash-Files (Foil)
- by Hom3land3r
A poster in full B-movie mode: dark pine forest, night sky, and a flashbang hanging above the treeline in a halo of light. I WANT TO SEE in heavy type along the bottom.
It’s almost certainly a nod to Mulder’s I WANT TO BELIEVE poster from The X-Files, shifted by exactly one step: the saucer becomes a flashbang, believing becomes seeing. The joke lands twice over, given that a flashbang is precisely the thing that stops you seeing.
The artist didn’t stop there, either. Scrape the sticker and The Flashbang is out there surfaces — a straight rewrite of the show’s tagline. That’s one submission carrying a cultural reference, an in-game joke and a scrape mechanic where wear doesn’t ruin the art but finishes it off. The foil treatment adds the glossy print texture those posters were sold on.
Sticker | Top Secret (Paper)
- by Zulek
A red TOP SECRET stamp on a transparent backing. No creature, no scene, no effects.
This one belongs to the utility class of stickers, the Censored school: the value isn’t in the image but in what you can do with it. The stamp goes over other stickers, over agents’ faces in the artwork, over any part of a finish you feel like classifying. One sticker, dozens of scenarios, none of which exist until it’s in an owner’s hands.
The theme fits perfectly. Cryptid mythology doesn’t rest on the creatures, it rests on concealment — sealed archives, redacted pages, a government that knows something. The stamp is the single most recognizable symbol of that whole story. Paper quality keeps the barrier low as well: stickers like this get bought by the handful without anyone checking the price first.
Sticker | Jackalope (Glitter)
- by yoshimoora
A jackalope — the horned hare of American West folklore — pinned to your weapon by a combat knife driven through one antler. Pastel palette, mint and pink, glitter throughout, and the contrast with the subject matter is about as sharp as it gets.
The artist has done the reading, too: the legend has jackalopes uncatchable, absurdly fast, able to mimic human voices around a campfire, and lurable only with a mug of whiskey. In the reality of Counter-Strike 2, as the artist puts it, neither speed nor cunning did the beast any good.
It’s a rare case in this theme of a genuine named cryptid rather than another UFO, and one honestly folded into the world of the game: not an encyclopedia illustration but a trophy nailed to your gun.
Sticker | The Lake House (Lenticular)
- by bluete fiesta
A strip of film in warm sepia, sprocket holes down the edges, handwriting in the margins. In the frames: faces contorted well past anything human. The lenticular flips through them as the angle changes, turning the sticker into a small projector.
We’ve seen the idea before. Our last roundup had Sticker | Nessie Strip (Lenticular) built on the same construction — film frames plus a lenticular flip. That isn’t a complaint about either artist, it’s a signal: two people arrived at the same solution independently because it’s the sharpest and most original reading of the theme going. Cryptid myths live on bad film stock, and the sticker is made of the same material as the myth.
There is a difference between the two, though. Nessie Strip is cold, documentary, black and white; The Lake House is warmer and a shade more real. We’re fairly confident one of them makes it into the game. The only question is which one Valve goes for.
Sticker | Blindspot
- by Wanda
A rear-view mirror, cracked at one corner, reflecting a forest road lit yellow by headlights and a horned figure standing perfectly still on the asphalt. A withered, clawed hand grips the frame from below.
The composition is the whole point. A mirror shows you what’s behind you, and the piece is built on the fact that you can’t look at the threat head-on. The horned figure reads easily as a wendigo, but the artist deliberately won’t let you make out the details: it stays a silhouette in the headlights.
The effect, per the artist, comes alive on the tilt — turn the mirror and whatever was sitting in your blind spot starts to move. There’s no formal tie to CS2 here at all, but the road, the mirror and the thing following you make up one of the most durable setups in horror, which is exactly why it works without a word of explanation.
Alex
Alex is an author and esports observer with more than seven years of experience. He specializes in analyzing new releases in the world of computer games, gaming services, and in-game economies. Alex shares practical experience and an expert perspective on the development of gaming, helping readers understand complex mechanics and stay up to date with the latest news.
