Tier 1 vs Tier 2 Blue Gems: What's the Difference in Price?

Tier 1 AK-47 Case Hardened Blue Gems have sold for roughly $4,000 to $8,500 on CSFloat, with one sticker-loaded outlier at $26,750. Tier 2 barely trades: the couple of sales on record both carried stickers, so there isn't a sticker-free Tier 2 price to quote yet.

The gap between the tiers is mostly about how much blue you see. The gap in price is mostly about how few of each exist.

The seed lists

These are the seeds tracked in each group on this site. Seven in Tier 1, six in Tier 2, out of 1,001 possible.

Neither list is official. Valve doesn't rank Blue Gems, and the tiers came out of players arguing over screenshots for a decade. Other trackers move a seed or two between tiers. If your seed sits on a boundary, expect buyers to argue about it.

What separates them

A Tier 1 seed puts an almost unbroken sheet of blue across the side of the AK you see in first person, usually running onto the magazine and the top of the receiver. A Tier 2 seed is still mostly blue on that side. But something interrupts it, a gold patch near the magazine or a purple streak across the middle, or the backside is noticeably weaker.

It's a small visual difference. And it's a big one in the market, because collectors want the cleanest example, not the second cleanest.

What Tier 1 has sold for

The group is top-heavy even by Case Hardened standards. When this was written, the group's average sale sat near $12,000, and one seed was doing most of that work:

Pattern #670 set the ceiling at $26,750, but that sale carried four Katowice 2014 stickers. The same seed also sold sticker-free for $4,200. Same pattern, 6.4x apart, and the stickers account for the difference. The fifth-best seed in the group, #321, tops out at $6,019.

And #661, probably the best-known Blue Gem seed of them all, had no recorded CSFloat sale at all. That doesn't make it cheap. It means the people who own one aren't selling in public.

So if someone quotes you "Tier 1 is worth $12k", ask which seed and whether it had stickers.

Why Tier 2 is so hard to price

Six seeds, a small share of those copies in good wear, and owners who mostly hold. Tier 2 sales on CSFloat are rare, and the ones on record came with stickers attached.

A stickered sale tells you what the whole package sold for. It doesn't tell you what the seed added, and on a Blue Gem that's the question that matters.

Estimating a Tier 2 anyway

Bracket it. A sticker-free Tier 2 should sell for more than a sticker-free Tier 3 in the same wear and less than a sticker-free Tier 1.

The Tier 3 end is well documented. A sticker-free Factory New copy of seed 750 sold for $1,485, and Tier 3 trades often enough that you can find a recent comparable in your wear:

The Tier 1 end is the sticker-free $4,200 sale of #670. That puts a sticker-free Tier 2 somewhere between about $1,500 and $4,200. It's my estimate from the tiers on either side, not a recorded Tier 2 price, and wear will move it within that range (float values explained shows by how much).

Every figure above comes from completed CSFloat cash transactions recorded per pattern index. Steam Market prices aren't used, since Steam doesn't record the seed.

Liquidity counts too

If you might want to sell later, the tier's price matters less than how often anyone buys. Tier 1 and Tier 2 can both sit for months without a public sale. Tier 3 and Tier 4 are where AK-47 Blue Gems change hands often enough to price with any confidence.

The blue gem tier guide covers all four tiers and the Blue Gem groups on other weapons. To find your own seed, see how to check the pattern index of a CS2 skin.