That site seems to suggest there’s differing rarity in play here, but the sale prices does not appear to reflect that. Some how I’ve managed to get all the rarer backgrounds but not the common ones.
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if you click your item in inventory, you can see the rarity Valve have assigned to a given object
for most emotes, background this does not matter/reflect on price, only few does (usually tied more to “rare” in sense of “limited badge amount crafted”, low supply or some few cases of “popularity”)
could say Foils are the “rare” equivalent with cards, where price do reflect it, tho they are actually also “rare” vs some emotes/backgrounds given the mass amount of badge crafts, -especially with event stuff
where it does play a huge role is in the other marketable things, TF2 items, csgo skins etc and so on
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found it
(now ask me if i’ve ever input “gnome” and hit search there) 
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Oh, that site looks great! I am going to bookmark your post and @Enki’s post so I can keep track of these sites!
Oh no! I foresee myself spending more money buying emoticons instead of cards from this point forward, I already see a bunch that I like…
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steam card exchange i believe you need to hit up a specific “game”/appid/“name” to get things listed, so handy to see everything what X “app” has to offer
steam tools you can browse also by generic term, making it easier to directly look up a bunch of “similar” stuff like “squirrel” emotes, or “thumbs up” or such, since it just picks everything that then sorta falls within the search parameters/word, regardless of game/appid
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I’d say the only thing holding those prices up atm is precisely cuz ppl (stupidly) buy them to turn them into gems
I wouldn’t be surprised if those prices come crashing down once the sales are over though
though i wouldn’t know, sometimes i just don’t understand why the market behaves the way it does, lol
I once invested my whole wallet in 1000 cs go capsules for a major, when i saw a few days later there were already 100k on the market, i chickened out cuz i felt there was no way the market would b able to support such offer and the whole thing would crash soon, so i sold everything and made something like $20 profit; 2 days later the price skyrocketed and more than quadrupled; had i waited those 2 days i would have made $300 profit…
no regrets though, making $20 beats losing everything any day of the week
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well. just as recent as july 2nd i sold a steam summer 2016 event item, and a holiday item, for the “full”/avg asking price…
sure i listed it like back in January… but like i said, since i can’t spend anything on either 3cents or 6 cents anyway, it doesn’t really matter (to me) when i get to “sell” them… since they sell “eventually”
if you are a profit/time objective trader, ofc there are loads better, more efficient and faster ways to make your cents/money, where crushing into 100gems just makes more sense, especially if waiting for the sacks to bounce back up during the “off seasons”
but for a schmo like me, with what 7, 9 13 crushable items at best maybe? (talking spares since i like to keep 1 copy), then it’s just too much bother imo. Especially if when don’t land on an even x10crush(when crushing 100gem items), since any gem crushed outside an even 1000 can’t be sold, making any/all gems beyond that utterly wasted/stuck in “sale limbo” anyway, until you can get to crush more items bringing you up to the full sack
(so would still have to wait 6months regardless, where i then just got 6cents vs 4-5) 
i’m not “not doing the gems” because of some true market speculative money profiteering ploy i have, -i’m just not bothering because i’m way to freakin lazy + dgaf about the potential small cent difference anyway
mafs! 
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realizing i had dupes for this too i sent you a trade so you can get the backgrounds 
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Cheers! I’m all set then. Thank you.
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Are any of the backgrounds any good? I haven’t looked at them this year…not even sure which ones I actually have.
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No, none of the backgrounds that I have ever seen on steam has been any good. I have 50 of them and they’re all shite.
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Nothing I would go out of my way to use in my profile…
Merely a collection’s sake…
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These are not from the Steam events, are they? I think perhaps @Fraggles was referring to the ones he has gotten from the Steam specific events. Maybe?
If general backgrounds are what we are talking about here, I have seen some nice ones too…
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Well yes and no, I do mostly have steam events ones but none of the game specific ones I have have been very good either. In the end the whole feature of the background for your profile is, in my opinion, badly implemented and pointless. Unless you for some reason use steam in full-screen the background is barely visible anyway and most of them are still ugly.
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I disagree, lol, look at this for example, background covers most of the profile:
and what do u mean full-screen, why wouldn’t steam be full-screen?
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Okay… I think there are some nice ones, but the Steam profile does block off a good chunk of whatever image is in the middle, which is why they are mostly left and right side oriented.
I don’t have any trouble seeing the full backgrounds on Steam unless I am using my laptop, which doesn’t have enough pixels to show me what the background has to display, but on a 1080P monitor, the background comes through without any difficulty.
So I think @harith is right here, there are some really nice backgrounds on Steam… And fortunately you can download them to use elsewhere too…
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Only because of your artwork showcase thing. Without it your background would only be some vaguely blue fuss along the very edges of the window as I see it.
It’s a nice background, similar to some old eve-online screenshots I used to use myself long ago. I suppose there ARE some good ones, I mean there’s bound to be, don’t know how many million backgrounds there are to get. I maintain that I find them pointless to use for steam profiles though.
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i do agree that the vast majority of backgrounds are just trash/good for nothing but “profit” off in some fashion (still keep my singles tho) -especially with the majority of steam event backgrounds too being boring af. But a few a still neat to look at (really liking the eve one for instance)
i also agree that valve has implemented them rather poorly on the profiles, -either having to “hack” and use the screenshot/artwork showcases, or settling for losing about half in the middle of the screen (which is evident in that semi-funny matter where some backgrounds straight up have their center blacked out lel)
and not actually covering your entire profile either in its full lenght -the more showcases you get/the “longer” your profile is, the background wont “scroll cover”
i will say, what the backgrounds can be nice for too, is to function as desktop backgrounds, since you can go to the background database archive thingy, and just snap those “high-res”(not really that high res tho) steam profile backgrounds to use on your device, wallpaper your bedroom etc
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Had this guide for about 2 years in my fav steam guides:
Hasn’t been updated since the beginning of this year, but still pretty complete.
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