The AK-47 | Case Hardened with pattern index 661 is often called the most expensive skin in CS2. It is the best-known "Blue Gem": nearly the whole rifle is covered in deep blue. Its price is not set by the market in the usual sense. In January 2024 a StatTrak Factory New copy surfaced on a trading platform, and collectors put its value as high as $1 million. For comparison, a regular AK-47 | Case Hardened starts at about $160 on LIS-SKINS. Below we cover why #661 is so rare, how small the odds of getting one are, and what drives its price.
When people talk about the most expensive skins in CS2, they usually mean knives with rare patterns or items in short supply, such as the AWP | Dragon Lore or M4A4 | Howl. The AK-47 #661 stands apart: what makes it valuable is not the finish itself but one specific color layout that appears on one pattern index out of a thousand.
What the AK-47 Case Hardened #661 is
The AK-47 | Case Hardened was released in 2013 in the game's first case, the CS:GO Weapon Case (Arms Deal Collection), at Classified rarity. It exists in all five wears, from Factory New to Battle-Scarred, as well as in StatTrak and Souvenir versions. Every copy has a pattern index from 0 to 1000 that decides how the blue, gold, and purple areas fall across the rifle. Most patterns produce a mix of colors, and only a handful of indexes give an almost fully blue AK.
Pattern 661 is considered the best of them: blue covers both sides of the receiver and the top of the rifle. Our AK-47 Case Hardened pattern guide explains which other indexes are valued and how to tell them apart, and you can check your own copy with the guide on how to check a skin pattern in CS2.
Odds of getting one
The pattern index sets the coloring, so the skin has about a thousand possible variants. Multiply all the conditions and the chance of unboxing one specific copy, a StatTrak Factory New with index 661, comes to roughly 1 in 21 million case openings:
A Classified item drops from a case 3.2% of the time, and the CS:GO Weapon Case has two of them (the other is the Desert Eagle | Hypnotic), so the chance of an AK-47 | Case Hardened is about 1.6%.
About one in ten case drops is StatTrak, so roughly 10%.
There are about a thousand pattern indexes, so any specific one has about a 0.1% chance.
The skin's float range runs from 0 to 1, and by a common estimate about 3% of drops land in Factory New.
Put together, the chance of a fresh StatTrak Factory New AK-47 Case Hardened (#661) is about 0.0000048%. No wonder such a copy stayed unknown for so long: the CS:GO Weapon Case has not been in the drop pool for years, and few unopened copies remain on the market. Our article on the most expensive cases in CS2 covers what the case and other rare containers cost today.
It is not known exactly how the owner got this skin. It may have come from a trade-up contract rather than a case: an AK-47 | Case Hardened can be made from 10 Restricted skins of the Arms Deal Collection. With the right inputs you can guarantee StatTrak and a low float, but the pattern index is still random, so this route also takes a large investment with no guaranteed result.
AK-47 Case Hardened price
Collectors have floated estimates of up to a million dollars, but the real price of #661 depends on what a specific buyer is willing to pay. Unique copies work much like fine art in this respect: such deals happen privately rather than through ordinary listings. The AK-47 #661 is valued for its blue coverage, and Factory New wear plus a kill counter push the value of this copy higher still.
Regular copies without a rare pattern cost orders of magnitude less. Current LIS-SKINS prices:
| AK-47 | Case Hardened version | Price |
|---|---|
| Battle-Scarred | from $160 |
| Field-Tested | around $200 |
| Minimal Wear | around $260 |
| Factory New | around $430 |
| StatTrak Factory New | around $970 |
| Souvenir Factory New | around $1,050 |
The gap between these copies and #661 shows how much the pattern drives Case Hardened prices. To compare the #661 with other high-end rifles, see our list of the most expensive AK-47 skins in CS2.
Past deals for similar items also give a reference point. According to the community, #661 copies in other wears and with rare stickers have already changed hands for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the owner of a Factory New Karambit | Case Hardened with a blue pattern once reportedly turned down an offer in the region of a million. So prices of that order are possible for the best Blue Gems. The priciest knives with patterns like these are covered in our article on the most expensive knives in CS2.
FAQ
What is the most expensive skin in CS2?
There is no single official record, because the biggest deals are private. The usual candidates are the AK-47 Case Hardened #661, the AWP | Dragon Lore with rare stickers, and knives with top patterns. The full list is in our roundup of the most expensive skins in CS2.
How is #661 different from a regular AK-47 Case Hardened?
Only in the color layout. The model, rarity, and wear work the same for every copy, but on index 661 the rifle is almost entirely blue, while ordinary patterns mix blue, gold, and purple.
Can you buy an AK-47 #661?
Not through a regular purchase: such copies almost never appear in open listings, and deals happen directly between collectors. A regular AK-47 | Case Hardened is available on LIS-SKINS from about $160.
What is the most expensive sticker in CS2?
The Katowice 2014 stickers, especially the holo team versions, are usually considered the most expensive. Read more about the record holders in our article on the most expensive sticker in CS2.
