Butterfly Case Hardened Blue Gem Patterns

The rarity of the naturally occurring blue color makes plants or animals with this dye unique and appealing. Keeping this (or at least a similar) logic in mind, Valve did not add many blue-ish skins into Counter-Strike, but the ones introduced into the game are often rare and prohibitively highly expensive. The Butterfly Knife Case Hardened Blue Gems are a perfect illustration of this principle, being among the least accessible yet most desirable items in the game.

The majority of CS2 players know that a skin’s value depends on its rarity, cass, and wear. However, the Case Hardened skin family is an exemption to this rule, with the unique configuration of a particular item having more impact on its price than, for instance, its float number. The pattern indexl, ranging from 1 to 999, determines dye proportions and painting geometry of each Case Hardened skin.

Some pattern numbers correspond to pale yellow or purple dominating the knife’s surface, while others turn the skin almost completely blue. These latter variants, like the #838 Blue Gem Butterfly Knife displayed above, are extremely rare and can cost thousands of dollars on the secondary market.

What are the Differences Between Butterfly Case Hardened Patterns?

With this in mind, defining the best Butterfly Blue Gem patterns is quite straightforward. Traditionally for the Case Hardened skins, Blue Gems are the copies with at least 50% of the knife surface covered in blue, with higher percentages of this color having more value.

Furthermore, a unique animation of Butterfly knives makes them a few times more expensive than other similar items. For example, the cheapest Battle-Scarred copy with a non-Blue Gem pattern we were able to find costs around $800.

When scanning online skin markets for the best Butterfly Case Hardened pattern options, you’ll immediately find out that there are only a few dozen knives available for sale. The majority of them are not Blue Gems, but will still cost you $1,500 or more.

As you can see, even the patterns that aren’t considered Blue Gems are pretty popular and rarely appear on the market. Their prices mirror this situation, forcing collectors to spend thousands of dollars for the pieces with plenty of blue hues. Blue Gems are also often divided into four tiers depending on the percentage of blue on their metal parts.

It’s important to mention that, unlike Shadow Daggers Blue Gem patterns, the coloring of Butterfly knives is similar on both sides of the blade. Therefore, you won’t have a knife that is perfectly blue on the visible side but has a lot of gold on the back.

Now, let’s discuss Butterfly Case Hardened Blue Gem skin patterns and their tiers in more detail.

Butterfly Case Hardened Seeds

The CS community divides Butterfly Blue Gem patterns into four tiers, depending on the amount of azure dye on the knife’s edge. Tier 1 patterns are almost totally azure, while their Tier 4 counterparts have around 50% blue. That’s how the tier list works:

1. Tier 1—more than 95% of the knife surface is blue;
2. Tier 2—80% to 95%;
3. Tier 3—65% to 80%;
4. Tier 4—50% to 65%.

Those numbers are pretty approximate, but illustrate the basic idea behind the tiers. The best Butterfly Blue Gem seeds of Tier 1 quality include only six patterns, while the 4th tier comprises almost a hundred. It also means that opening the Operation Breakout Weapon Case (the only way to obtain this knife type in-game) is even more of a tricky lottery, and your chances of obtaining a rare skin are almost null.

Here is the table of patterns and responsive tier seeds:

1st Tier Butterfly Case Hardened Patterns (Blue Gem)

Determining the market price of the most expensive Butterfly Blue Gem tier-1 skins is a surprisingly challenging task. An extremely low supply of Case Hardened Butterfly knives means only a few dozen copies are available for purchase at any given time, and most of them are not Blue Gems at all. With only a single Blue Gem of the 4th tier present on the markets at the time of writing the article, we can only assume what the prices for the other tiers can be.

The #182 knife has most of its surface covered in blue, with just a few purple and dark yellow spots. The price for such a copy, if by some miracle one ever becomes available for sale, will definitely exceed 10k dollars, maybe even a few times over.

Another elite Blue Gem with a pattern index of 494 has a different design of the non-blue stains but keeps a huge amount of azure hue on the edge. An approximate price for the Factory New copy can also exceed tens of thousands of dollars.

2nd Tier Patterns

As you’ve probably guessed, Tier-2 Butterfly Knife Case Hardened patterns have more non-blue dye, although they still look pretty great. For example, the 147th pattern has a big yellow-blue stain, which contrasts with the rest of the edge. However, the overall impression is still amazing and deserves a Blue Gem name.

Pattern # 881 is pretty much the same story, but the yellow-blue hue is on the knife’s tip rather than in the middle of the blade. It also looks even better, as most of its edge part has a smooth blue dye. The Butterfly Blue Gem price for both tier-2 copies also remains theoretical and should be between 5 and 10 thousand dollars.

3rd & 4-th Tier Patterns

Finally, we return to the realm of concrete market data. On a third-party website, we were able to find  a Factory New #98 (tier-4) for $4,886.

Sometimes, it’s unclear why some Butterfly Case Hardened patterns were placed in a particular tier. For instance, if we compare our tier-4 #98 with tier-3 #664, we’ll discover that the latter has even less blue dye.

Another tier-3 pattern with an index of 108 looks much worse than both of those, and can hardly be considered a Blue Gem at all. And yet, here we are.

Well, that’s another reason to always take a good look at an expensive item before buying it. Table numbers can be misleading and cost you money, whatever it is you’re trying to buy. CS2 skin inspection is a very simple matter, so there’s no excuse not to double-check.

Conclusion

Case Hardened Butterfly Knives are among the most sought-after items in the game, and their Blue Gem variations enter fully into the category of long-term investments. We hope this article helped you to learn something new about this exclusive skin line and its numerous weird features.