CS2 Blue Gem Tier Guide

A Blue Gem is a Case Hardened skin whose pattern seed happens to put a big sheet of blue on the side of the gun you actually look at, and the tier lists rank seeds by how much blue that is. On the AK-47 only seven seeds out of 1,001 make Tier 1, which is why a seed number can be worth more than the rest of the skin put together.

Where the blue comes from

Case Hardened is cut from a large marbled texture with blue, gold and purple running through it. The seed picks which part of that texture lands on the receiver and magazine. A good roll puts the blue up front. A bad one hides it under the gun.

Nobody at Valve designed a "blue gem". Players spent years comparing screenshots and arguing about which seeds count, and the tiers came out of that.

The AK-47 Case Hardened tiers

Every seed below comes straight from the groups tracked on this site.

There's also a separate Blue Mag group (14 seeds, blue concentrated on the magazine) and two small Gold Gem groups, for seeds where gold dominates instead.

Seven and six seeds at the top. Then 37. Then 81. That curve is the whole reason Tier 1 prices look the way they do.

To check your own seed against all of these groups at once:

What they sell for

Tier 1 barely trades. The data this guide was checked against (sales recorded up to 11 May 2026) didn't contain a single Tier 1 sale. Check the group page for anything that's come in since, and treat any one sale as a data point, not a price.

Tier 2 is almost as thin, with two sales on record by May 2026. Both were stickered, which matters (more below).

Tier 3 and Tier 4 are where the market actually lives, so they're where the numbers mean something:

Every figure in those cards comes from completed CSFloat cash transactions, not Steam Community Market listings. Steam doesn't record the seed at all.

Three checks before you trust a number

Which seed. Tiers aren't flat. Open the individual pattern page for the seed you care about rather than leaning on the group average.

How old. In a thin tier the latest comparable might be months old. Use it as an anchor and nothing more.

Stickers. Most Case Hardened sales here carry stickers. In Tier 4, 26 of the 30 sales recorded by May 2026 were stickered. The biggest Tier 3 sale on record, $10,995.11 for seed 978, carried three Katowice 2014 holos, while a sticker-free Factory New copy of seed 750 went for $1,485 a few days earlier. How stickers affect skin prices walks through how to read sales like those.

Wear still counts

It's tempting to think the seed swamps everything else. It doesn't. In Tier 3, Battle-Scarred copies sold between $222.99 and $327.11, and nothing in Factory New went for under $1,130.60. The tier gets you into the room, and the float decides where you stand in it. Float values explained has the wear table.

Blue Gems on other skins

The same idea applies wherever Case Hardened or Heat Treated shows up, and several of those groups trade far more often than the AK's top tiers:

The MAC-10 group is a good example of a cheaper Blue Gem with real sales volume:

Knife Case Hardened groups exist for the Karambit and the Kukri too, though they hadn't recorded sales yet when this was written.

Anything else, start from the weapons directory. Unfamiliar terms are in the CS2 pattern glossary.