Blue Gem Karambit: #387, Tiers and Prices

Most Case Hardened Karambits look like someone left a blade on a forge for too long: gold, bronze, a few smudges of purple, maybe a blue patch near the spine. Then there is pattern #387. Flip it to the play side and the blade is blue from the tip to the guard, with almost no gold in sight. That one seed is the reason "blue gem karambit" became a search term at all, and why a single knife has been valued above most houses in Copenhagen.

This guide is for people who want more than the legend. We cover how the seed system decides the colour, why the play side is the only side most buyers care about, which seeds sit in which rank, what the big #387 deals actually were (with sources), and how to check a pattern yourself before money changes hands.

What makes a Karambit a blue gem

Case Hardened is a texture with blue, purple and gold patches baked in. When a Case Hardened skin is created, it is assigned a pattern seed between 0 and 999. The seed decides which part of that texture gets wrapped onto the knife model, so seed 387 on a Karambit always looks the same, while seed 387 on a Bayonet or an AK-47 looks completely different. Same number, different model, different result.

"Blue gem" is a community label, not a Valve rarity. Nothing in the game marks a knife as special. Collectors decided that blue is the valuable colour years ago, and the tier lists you see online are built by traders and guide writers who inspect seeds by hand. A loose rule used by Dot Esports is about 50% blue on the play side to count as a blue gem, with the top seeds reaching 85 to 100%.

Play side vs back side

The play side is the face of the blade you see in first person when you hold the knife in game. Karambit buyers price almost entirely on that side, because it is what you look at every round. A knife with a fully blue back side and a gold play side is a nice curiosity; the reverse is a blue gem. Some traders still pay a small premium for a strong back side, but the gap is big.

Blue gem Karambit tier list (play side)

We use the Steam Community guide Karambit Case Hardened | Blue Gem by korenevskiy and Krieke as our reference, because it ranks by play side and covers four ranks plus the #1 seed. Fetched 13 Oct 2026 (guide last updated 20 Mar 2026).

Seed lists above come from korenevskiy and Krieke's Steam Community guide, credited with thanks. The guide sorts roughly 140 more seeds into Ranks 2, 3 and 4, from strong partial blues down to knives with a decent blue patch; read the full ranks in the original guide rather than a copy.

What separates Rank 1 from #387

Put #269 or #442 next to #387 and the difference is small but obvious once you see it: a gold edge near the tip, a purple bruise on the belly, a darker patch by the guard. #387 has none of that worth mentioning on the play side. As you move down the ranks the gold creeps in, and by Rank 4 you are looking at knives that are partly blue rather than blue.

The #387: owner, offer and the knife that sold

The Factory New #387 has a float of 0.048 (win.gg). Its owner is a Chinese collector known as "Blue King", as reported by Dexerto. Dot Esports reports that he paid about $100,000 for it years ago, which would make it one of the best skin purchases ever made.

"1.2 is low." The owner's reply in September 2021, when ohnePixel brokered a private offer of €1.2 million in Bitcoin for the FN #387 (reported by win.gg).

That reply is where the "$1.5 million+" figure comes from. Nobody has paid it. It is a valuation built on a refused offer, and Dot Esports reports current estimates of $1.5 to 2 million with no completed sale in recent years. Worth remembering whenever someone quotes a "price" for the knife.

A #387 has actually changed hands for real money, though, just not the Factory New one. In April 2023 zipeL, one of the co-founders, at SkinBid, sold two items to the other SkinBid co-founder Luksusbums: a StatTrak Minimal Wear AK-47 Case Hardened #661, and a Well-Worn Karambit #387. The stickers were on the AK, not the knife: four Katowice 2014 Titan Holos, according to PC Gamer. The combined deal was over $500,000. TechSpot reported the AK went for over $400,000 and the knife for "a bit shy of $100,000". A Well-Worn #387 at roughly a twentieth of the FN valuation tells you how much float matters at the very top.

How many #387 Karambits exist

Dot Esports reports that nine #387 Karambits have been unboxed across all wears, with one Factory New. In 2022 win.gg cited CSGOFloat at eight, and said the cleanest after the FN was a Field-Tested at 0.165. The number has crept up over time, which is normal: old knives surface when inventories get inspected for the first time.

Odds of unboxing one

Short version: you will not. Knives drop at about 0.26% per case (per Dot Esports), and you then need the Karambit, then Case Hardened, then the right seed (1 in 1,000), then the wear. Stack those odds and Dot Esports lands at roughly 1 in 131 million case openings for a Factory New #387. Take it as a ballpark rather than a law of physics, since it depends on assumptions about wear and knife odds. Even at that figure, with every case plus key costing a few dollars, you would burn hundreds of millions before the maths says you are due one.

Trade-ups do not help with seeds. Valve's Covert-to-knife trade-up, added in the 22 October 2025 update, picks the knife from the collection, but the pattern is random, so you cannot target #387 or any blue gem.

Does float change the blue

No. Float changes wear and how dark the blade looks, not the layout of colours. Case Hardened does not show scratches like most skins; at high floats it gets a darker patina instead, which can make blue look muddier on camera. Price is a different story. Within the same seed, low floats carry a heavy premium, and the #387 deals above show the scale.

Blue gem Karambit price: what to expect

Blue gems have no list price. Each one is a private negotiation around rank, float and the buyer, and the only hard numbers we trust are the sourced #387 deals above. What we can give you is the floor a regular Karambit starts from.

Starting price for a regular Case Hardened Karambit

Source: lowest listings on the SkinWeb price comparison for Karambit | Case Hardened. These are entry prices for a random-pattern knife, usually a mostly gold blade. They are not blue gem prices and say nothing about what a ranked seed sells for. One quirk worth noticing: Battle-Scarred is listed about $80 above Well-Worn right now, because the cheapest BS copy simply costs more than the cheapest WW one. Floors move like that when only a handful of knives are listed per wear.

Ranked seeds rarely appear on public listings at their real value; most go through private deals and middlemen. If you see a "Rank 1" at a floor price, inspect it before you get excited, because mislabelled seeds are common.

How to check a seed before you trade

• Inspect the knife in game or with a trusted inspect tool and note the pattern seed and float.
• Load that seed in the SkinWeb 3D viewer and look at the play side, not just the listing screenshot.
• Compare the seed against more than one tier list and expect disagreement.
• Never trade through a link someone sends you in DMs; check the URL and API key settings first.

Which cases drop it

Karambit Case Hardened comes from the original-knife cases, starting with the CS:GO Weapon Case from the August 2013 Arms Deal update. Eleven cases can drop it: CS:GO Weapon Case, Weapon Case 2, Weapon Case 3, eSports 2013, eSports 2013 Winter, eSports 2014 Summer, Operation Bravo, Winter Offensive, Operation Phoenix, Operation Vanguard and Revolver. Later Karambit cases such as Chroma, Gamma and Gamma 2 carry newer finishes only, not Case Hardened.

Chasing blue on a real budget

Here is the uncomfortable truth: a Rank 3 or Rank 4 Karambit is still a five-figure-ish purchase for most of us, and a Rank 1 lives in private Discord deals. So think about what you actually want. If it is the feeling of pulling out a blue blade in a pistol round, you do not need a Karambit at all.

Every knife model maps the Case Hardened texture differently, which means each model has its own blue seeds, and they are not the Karambit's. Seed 387 on another knife can be mostly gold. Buyers who know this hunt for blue seeds on the less hyped models, where nobody has priced in the pattern yet, and they often find full blue play sides for a fraction of a ranked Karambit.

The other route is patience. Unranked Karambits sometimes have a large, clean blue patch on the play side that just misses a list's cutoff. Listings price them as plain Case Hardened. If you load the seed in the 3D viewer and like what you see in first person, the tier label matters less than you think, and resale is easier than with a rumoured gem.