CS2 Karambit Case Hardened: Blue Gem Patterns & Prices (2026)

Short answer: Karambit Case Hardened runs $620-1,600 depending on wear in its ordinary, non-blue-gem form, already one of the pricier knives on the site before pattern comes into play. Pattern matters more here than on almost any other item in CS2: the single rarest seed, #387, is currently valued at $1.5-2,000,000 and has never actually sold, its owner turned down a roughly $1.5 million offer in 2021. A separate, lower-condition copy of the same pattern sold for about $120,000 in June 2023, the clearest real transaction anyone has on record for this exact seed.

What makes a Karambit Case Hardened a “blue gem”

Answer: the finish carries two primary colors, gold and blue, and a copy where blue dominates the visible play side is what the community calls a blue gem, exactly the same underlying mechanic covered in our Case Hardened blue gem guide, just with a simpler two-tone palette than the AK-47 version of the same finish.

AK-47 Case Hardened mixes blue, purple, gold, and gray across its pattern range, which is part of why that weapon’s tier list reads differently from the Karambit’s. The Karambit’s simpler two-color system doesn’t make blue gems any easier to find, across the roughly 1,000 possible pattern seeds, only about a dozen are considered true blue gems, an even smaller share than on most weapon versions of this finish. Every Karambit shares the model’s own base price floor too, Karambit and Butterfly Knife are the two most expensive knife models in CS2 even in a plain finish, see our CS2 knife types guide for how that base-model premium stacks with pattern rarity to produce these numbers.

Case Hardened isn’t the only pattern-driven system that turns a Karambit into a six or seven-figure item. A Karambit Doppler’s value is set by an entirely different field, the paint index rather than the pattern index that drives blue gem coverage here, and it produces its own separate record tier in Ruby and Sapphire, see our Doppler phases guide for how that second system works and where it lands against Case Hardened in dollar terms.

The Karambit blue gem tier list

Answer: ten seeds make up the top blue gem tier, led by pattern #387, which is the only one with a play side that reads as almost entirely blue.

Pattern #387 sits alone at the top of that list. Every other Tier 1 seed is a genuine blue gem and commands a real premium over a random Case Hardened, but none come close to #387’s near-total blue coverage, which is the entire reason it, specifically, became the single most valuable item in CS2 rather than merely one of the pricier ones.

Pattern #387: the most valuable skin in CS2

Answer: the Factory New copy of pattern #387 is currently held privately and has never sold. Its owner turned down an offer of roughly 1,200,000 euros in Bitcoin in 2021, worth about $1.5 million at the time, calling it insufficient. Current community valuations run $1.5-2,000,000, with some estimates reaching $2.5 million if it were ever sold openly.

Only nine copies of pattern #387 are known to exist across every condition, with just one confirmed in Factory New, the copy involved in the rejected 2021 offer. A separate, lower-condition copy did actually change hands, a Well-Worn example sold for approximately $120,000 in June 2023, the clearest real transaction tied to this pattern rather than a valuation or a rejected bid. The odds of pulling this specific pattern on this specific knife from a case are estimated at somewhere between 1 in 131 million and 1 in 371 million, a low enough probability that most estimates treat the existing nine copies as effectively the entire supply that will ever exist. Our most expensive CS2 knives and skins roundup covers how this valuation stacks up against the AK-47’s own record pattern, #661, which actually sold, StatTrak and Factory New with four Katowice 2014 stickers, for over $1,000,000 in June 2024.

Where Karambit Case Hardened comes from

Answer: the finish isn’t tied to one case, it can drop from eleven different containers, including the original 2013 CS:GO Weapon Case, the eSports 2013 Case, and Operation Bravo Case.

Every case that includes Case Hardened in its knife pool gives the exact same base 0.26% Rare Special Item odds, identical to every other knife drop in the game, see our CS2 cases guide for how that flat rate applies across every container regardless of what’s inside. Which pattern seed lands on the knife you actually pull is a separate, much longer roll on top of that base odds, which is why owning any Case Hardened Karambit at all is already rare, and owning a blue gem specifically is a different order of rarity entirely.

FAQ

Where to go next

See our Case Hardened blue gem guide for how the same pattern mechanic works on the AK-47 and other weapons, our most expensive CS2 knives and skins roundup for how pattern #387 compares against every other record-holding item, our CS2 knife types guide for why Karambit carries a higher base price than most of the other 19 knife models even before pattern comes into play, and our Doppler phases guide for the other major pattern-driven value system on the same knife model.