Six hidden cards, personal discounts: the Night Market is one of those moments every Valorant player looks forward to. When it opens, how the selection works and how to get the most out of it – read on.
The Night Market appears roughly once per act (about every two months) and stays open for 1–2 weeks each time. You get 6 personalised skin cards with discounts from 10 % to just under 50 % – the selection is random and cannot be influenced.
The Night Market is one of the most popular features in Valorant – here you get skins with a personal discount. Here's how it works.
The Night Market reveals six random skins you don't own yet – each with a personal discount of roughly 10% to 47%. The cards below are example offers for illustration, not real prices for your account. Want to reveal cards yourself? Our Night Market simulator rolls six fresh offers for you anytime.
Rule of thumb: 1,000 VP ≈ €10. A 40% discount on a Premium skin (1,775 VP) therefore saves around €7. Work out the real euro value of your wishlist skins with Valorant-Spind.
The Night Market is a time-limited, personalised discount store. Instead of the normal store prices you get a selection of skins at reduced prices. The offers are individual to each player and are assembled from skins you don't already own.
The Night Market appears several times a year, usually around the start of a new act or episode, and then stays active for one to two weeks. Riot doesn't announce fixed dates far in advance – it pays to keep an eye on the game around act launches.
Always reveal all cards – it costs nothing. Above all, buy skins you'd wanted anyway when the discount is high. Whether a purchase is worth it is clearest relative to the regular price. How much your existing collection is already worth is shown to you by Valorant-Spind calculator.
For many players the Night Market is the best opportunity to get wished-for skins cheaply – especially at discounts of 30% or more. But since the offers are random, you don't always catch exactly the skin you want. Our tip: set yourself a budget beforehand and only buy skins you really like. How much your collection is already worth helps you decide – Valorant-Spind shows it to you at a glance.
Both paths lead to new skins, but they differ significantly. In the daily shop you always pay full price, but it's there every day. The Night Market comes only a few times a year, but then offers real discounts. If you want to save, save your VP balance specifically for the night market rather than buying spontaneously in the daily shop. One small catch: because the cards are random, it's never guaranteed that your absolute wished-for skin is included – but older skins that rarely appear in the normal shop often show up.
The Night Market is not one of the features Valorant launched with in the summer of 2020. The regular shop and the first bundles were there from the start, but a personalised discount store was completely missing at first. Riot introduced the night market only later, after many players had asked for a way to buy older skins more cheaply. The core problem was quickly recognised: anyone who had missed a certain collection at release often couldn't acquire it for months, because the daily shop rotates its selection purely at random. The Night Market was conceived as a counterweight – a recurring window in which skins you don't yet own specifically appear, at prices below the usual level.
Since then the format has barely changed, which is unusual for Riot. The card motif, the step-by-step reveal and the individual discounts have stayed practically the same over the years. What has been adjusted is mainly details: the visual design of the cards, occasional seasonal frames and the question of which skin categories are even considered. For the community the night market has thus become a fixed ritual that recurs roughly in the rhythm of the acts – so roughly every two months – and stays open for one to two weeks each time. It is exactly this regularity that explains why speculation about the next date arises around every act launch.
When the night market is active you don't have to look for it – Valorant points it out on its own. In the main menu and the store area an additional tab or a clearly visible banner appears, often kept in dark violet, that sets the night market apart from the regular offer. A click on it opens the view with the six face-down cards. It's hard to miss, because at the start of a market Riot additionally plays a short visual effect the first time you enter the menu.
However, the night market only becomes visible once your account meets the usual basic requirements that also apply to the normal purchase of skins – above all a sufficiently unlocked game level. On brand-new accounts that are still at the beginning of the first unlocks, access can therefore still be missing. As soon as the store is regularly usable, the night market is also shown, provided it's currently running. When the promotional period ends, the tab disappears completely again and your unpurchased cards are gone – until the next market, which brings new, freshly drawn offers.
At first glance the reveal looks like a game of chance with an open outcome, but technically the matter is already decided before you click the first card. The moment the night market is generated for your account, all six skins and all six discount values are already fixed. The animation in which a card flips over and slowly reveals the skin and the crossed-out original price is pure staging. It no longer changes the result. That's the most important point for putting many of the circulating pieces of advice into perspective.
Each card carries its own independently drawn discount. So it's normal for one card to show only a small reduction while a considerably higher value appears right next to it. The range typically runs from about 10% to just under 50%, and the individual values are not coupled to one another. A high discount on the first card makes a high discount on the second neither more nor less likely. Just as little is there a fixed number of cards with a strong reduction per market – sometimes several good values are included at once, sometimes the entire selection stays in the lower range. In the end you pay quite normally with Valorant Points, where 1,000 VP at sale correspond to around 10 euros. The displayed discount always relates to the regular VP price of the respective skin.
Not every skin in Valorant can land in the night market, and that regularly causes misunderstandings. Riot draws the selection from the stock of skins you don't already own – so weapon designs already bought are fundamentally excluded. This makes the Night Market interesting above all for players who already have some collections but still have gaps. Anyone who owns almost everything sees something new correspondingly less often, while a young account with a small collection almost always gets six unknown cards.
Decisive is the tier of the skin: in the night market only weapon skins of the tiers Select, Deluxe and Premium appear. The most expensive classes – Ultra and Exclusive – generally don't show up there – since 2025 Riot only allows the older Exclusive lines BlastX, Glitchpop and Singularity –, nor do Battle Pass skins and gear items. A knife can appear, but only if its original price is at most 3,550 VP – more expensive knives (4,350 VP and up) stay excluded. In addition, a skin must have already been in the shop for at least two acts before it can even slide into the night market pool. So Riot reserves the elaborate high-end collections with animated effects and their own finishers for the regular shop and the bundles. In the Night Market you therefore mostly find skins from the middle and lower price classes: solid weapon designs, older collections and single pieces that only rarely come by in the daily offer. But that is precisely its real appeal, because it is these mid-priced skins that are most likely to be worthwhile with a decent discount. How the price classes and value tiers relate to each other can be well understood on the page about the value of Valorant skins.
Because both are time-limited, many players lump the night market and the bundles together. In fact they work in opposite ways. A bundle is a curated package: Riot puts several weapons of a collection together with additional items like a buddy, spray or card display into the shop at a fixed price. This price is the same for all players, the composition is predetermined, and the discount versus buying individually is – if at all – small and likewise identical for everyone. A bundle is aimed at players who want a complete collection in one go.
The night market reverses this principle. Here there is no fixed composition and no uniform price. Instead, each account receives its own six individual cards with individually rolled reductions. You don't buy a package but specific individual skins – and only the ones you like. So anyone looking for a whole collection in pure form is better off waiting for the matching bundle in the normal shop. Anyone who wants to cheaply catch up on individual favourites, on the other hand, is clearly better served in the Night Market. Both paths complement each other but don't replace each other.
Around the night market persistent legends have formed that keep turning up in chats and comments. Most of them can be refuted with a look at the mechanic, because they all rest on the same fallacy: the assumption that your behaviour when revealing could still change the result.
This is the best-known misconception. Whether you start left or right, whether you click slowly or fast, makes no difference. All six cards are already fixed once the market was generated for you. You only reveal what is stored anyway. There is no "lucky card" in the middle and no position that delivers better values.
That's not true either. Your six cards don't change during the one to two weeks of runtime. A skin you see on the first day has exactly the same discount on the last day. Anyone who waits gains time to think at most, but no better prices.
There is no proven connection between past spending and the quality of your cards. The pool feeds from the skins you're still missing, not from your buying behaviour. Big collectors tend to see less choice, because they simply lack fewer skins.
"A new account is guaranteed top skins"
A fresh account does have a large pool of possible cards, because it owns almost nothing – but the discount level is still drawn randomly. A large pool only increases variety, not the probability of high reductions.
Strategy and budget in the night market
Because nothing about the result can be changed any more, every sensible strategy shifts to the time before the night market and to the buying decision itself. The most important lever is your VP balance. Anyone who knows the next market is roughly due at the upcoming act launch can deliberately save towards it, instead of spending their balance spontaneously in the daily shop. That way, at the decisive moment, enough is ready to strike on a really good discount without having to top up first. To judge instantly how good a discount really is, compare it with the regular set prices in our Valorant bundles list.
A simple routine for the next market
A second lever is patience across several markets. Because the pool is drawn anew from your missing skins at every night market, your selection changes from time to time. A skin that doesn't appear this time or is only weakly discounted can appear at the next market in a few weeks with a better value. So anyone who doesn't fully exhaust every market misses nothing final, but only postpones the decision. That takes a lot of pressure out of the moment of revealing and helps to decide more calmly.
A common mistake is buying out of a pure discount reflex. A skin you'd never use is no bargain even at 45% off, but only a smaller expense for something you don't need. Conversely, a moderate discount of 20% on exactly the weapon you most like to play can be the smarter decision. The percentage is a hint, not an end in itself. It helps to know beforehand which weapons you actually hold in hand most often in the game – usually a skin for the primary weapon of your choice is far more worthwhile than one for a weapon that rarely sees use.
A worked example for the night market
To make the percentages more tangible, a simple example helps. Suppose behind a card is a skin with a regular price of 1,775 VP – a common value for many mid-range collections. At 1,000 VP for around 10 euros that corresponds to about 17.75 euros in value. If the night market applies a 15% discount to it, you save about 266 VP and still pay around 1,509 VP – roughly 15 euros. If the discount instead comes out at 40%, only 1,065 VP remain, so roughly 10.65 euros. The pure saving of around 7 euros makes clear why it pays to look at the absolute amount and not just the percentage.
The same principle flips with cheap skins. A design for 875 VP at 40% off still costs 525 VP – the 350 VP saved correspond to only about 3.50 euros. So a small percentage on an expensive weapon can save more real money than a large percentage on a cheap one. Because VP are also mostly sold in fixed packs, a remainder often stays on the account after a purchase. Leaving this remainder for the next market instead of spending it spontaneously in the daily shop is part of a calm buying strategy. Anyone who likes keeps rough track of how much value is already in their own collection – that way every new expense can be better assessed.
Is waiting really worth it?
Whether it's worth waiting for the night market with a purchase depends above all on how attached you are to a specific skin. If you don't care which design you get and it's only about some nice skin at a good price, then waiting is almost always sensible. The night market regularly delivers exactly such opportunities, and one to two months of patience cost nothing but the waiting time. If, on the other hand, you have a concrete wished-for skin firmly in mind, waiting becomes a gamble: there's no guarantee that exactly this design ever appears in your six cards, and even if it does, the discount is random. In this case buying regularly in the shop, as soon as the skin appears there, can be the more reliable choice.
A middle solution works well for many: buy the absolute wished-for skin regularly when the opportunity arises and leave everything else to the night market. That way you combine predictability for the heart pieces with the cheap chance finds for the rest of the collection. It's only important not to be driven by the fear of missing an offer – the market reliably returns, and no single night market is the last chance for a good skin.
Assessing the value of an offer correctly
A discount on its own says little about whether a purchase is good. Only in relation to the actual usefulness and the regular price does the number make sense. It helps to measure every night market skin against three questions: how often would I really play this weapon? How high is the regular VP price from which the discount is subtracted? And does the skin even fit my style and the collections I already have? Only when these three answers fit together is a reduction a real argument.
Especially for players with an already grown collection, a look at the big picture pays off. Anyone who knows the total value of their skins assesses an individual night market offer much more easily and recognises faster whether a card would be a sensible addition or just another design in the box. That's exactly what Valorant-Spind is for: the tool shows you the summed value of your existing skins and thereby makes visible where a cheap night market card really enriches your collection. That way the random card game becomes a considered decision – and the night market stays what it should be: a good opportunity, not a compulsion.
In the long run this attitude pays off. Anyone who at every market only buys the cards that really fit spends less over the year and still has a collection they stand behind. The skins bought for a clear reason bring more joy later than those that only landed in the locker because of a high percentage. The night market rewards exactly this restraint: because it reliably returns, waiting is never a loss, only a postponement to the next good moment. With this view the night market turns from buying pressure into a relaxed opportunity to grow your collection step by step and at fair prices.
Keep an eye on your locker's value
Valorant-Spind shows you the total value of your skins – handy for assessing night market offers.
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Night Market: the key facts
The last Night Market ran from July 16 to 29, 2026. The next one is not confirmed yet but is expected between late September and early October 2026 – in 2025 the autumn edition started on September 26. Riot usually confirms the date about a week in advance. For the current status and a live countdown, see our page Night Market: next date.
The discounts typically lie between about 10% and 50% per skin. They are random and individual to each player.
No. The offered skins and discounts are randomly assembled from skins you don't already own. It can't be influenced.
Roughly once per act, so about every two months. Riot announces an exact date beforehand each time.
