The Desert Eagle | Heat Treated is the closest thing CS2 has to a Case Hardened pistol, and it was never in a case. It arrived with The Armory update on 2 October 2024 as a limited edition item: 25 Armory credits, earned by playing, redeemable for about a hundred days. Then Valve took it off the shelf. Everything in circulation now was pulled in that window, and the only way in is the market.
It is Classified, it has no StatTrak, and it is worth almost nothing. Factory New sits around $45; every other condition is between one and two and a half dollars. Which makes it the purest pattern skin in the game — with a base that cheap, whatever a copy sells for above it is the pattern.
What the seed decides
Heat Treated uses the Case Hardened trick: an anodised finish where the colour is a map, and the paint seed picks which slice of that map lands on the slide. Roll 0 to 1000. Some copies come out blue, most come out grey and gold, and a handful come out blue enough that people pay four figures for a two-dollar pistol.
Unlike a knife, the Deagle has one face worth measuring. The blue-gem colour data this site runs on records a play side for it and nothing else — a knife gets its two blade faces counted separately, the Deagle gets the side you actually see.
The tier list everybody quotes
The reference the trading community uses is the Desert Eagle Heat Treated | Blue Gem guide on Steam. It sorts all 1001 seeds into four groups: an elite handful shown on their own — 490, 148, 69 and 704 — then Rank 1 (39 seeds), Rank 2 (44), a purple tier (96) and a gold tier (95). All of them are reproduced in full further down.
Every marketplace blog since has repeated it, and along the way the numbers grew. Seed 490 is now routinely described as "over 90% blue" and the Rank 1 group as "80%+ blue". Those figures are quoted everywhere and sourced nowhere.
So we counted.
The five bluest seeds
Play-side coverage, measured pixel by pixel off the rendered pattern rather than eyeballed. Blue, purple and gold are the three colours the anodising produces; other is the bare steel underneath.
| # | Seed | Blue | Purple | Gold | Other | Guide tier |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 490 | 76.87% | 7.10% | 8.08% | 7.95% | Top four |
| 2 | 704 | 76.48% | 7.46% | 8.26% | 7.80% | Top four |
| 3 | 148 | 75.41% | 7.40% | 9.00% | 8.19% | Top four |
| 4 | 69 | 75.02% | 5.89% | 11.12% | 7.97% | Top four |
| 5 | 567 | 73.74% | 8.17% | 9.66% | 8.42% | Rank 1 |
Two things fall out of the full count.
First, nothing reaches 80%, let alone 90%. Seed 490 tops out at 76.87% and the field behind it is tight — twenty-four seeds clear 70%, and the gap from first to twenty-fourth is 6.44 points. Where the inflated numbers come from is not a mystery: add blue and purple together and eighteen seeds cross 80%, 490 among them at 83.97%. That is a defensible way to count a blue gem, since the purple is the same anodising at a different depth. It is just not what "90% blue" says.
Second, the guide's ordering is sound even where its percentages are not. Every one of its 39 Rank 1 seeds lands inside our top 49 — there is not a single dud in the list. The elite four really are the four bluest seeds in the game, in almost exactly the order it gives them. Whoever assembled it was looking at the right thing and describing it loosely.
What the tiers look like in the hand
Four seeds, one angle, one weapon. Nothing changes between these pictures except the number.
The top roll. The slide runs blue end to end, the violet is confined to the edges and the machining, and there is almost no gold anywhere — 8.08%, which is the lowest gold reading of all 1001 seeds. Bluest and least gold at once is why this one and not its neighbours.
A Rank 2 seed, and a fair picture of what most of the top hundred looks like. Still clearly a blue gun, but the blue is interrupted: violet through the ejection port, a brown-gold band across the middle of the slide, 16.72% gold in total against 490's 8.08%.
Eighteen points of blue is the whole distance between a four-figure ask and a normal listing.
A purple-tier seed. Blue survives only in patches; the slide is violet shading into brown-gold, with bare steel showing through.
It is also almost exactly the middle of the distribution — the median seed measures 28.9% blue, 404 measures 27.56%. Half of every Deagle ever pulled is duller than this.
And this is the skin as most people own it. Almost half the slide — 46.07% — is bare steel that the anodising never reached, with the colour reduced to a copper wash near the muzzle and a little blue on the frame.
Nothing wrong with it. It is just the $45 Factory New that nobody checked the number on, and it is what you should assume you are being offered until the seed says otherwise.
Three seeds the tier list undersells
The seams show at the Rank 1 / Rank 2 boundary. 651 measures 72.14% blue — eleventh overall, ahead of nineteen Rank 1 seeds — and sits in Rank 2. So do 406 (71.02%, eighteenth) and 876 (70.90%, twentieth).
On a skin where the tier list is the price, a top-twenty seed carrying a second-tier label is the one arbitrage this market offers. It will not last: lists get corrected. But it is there now.
The full tier lists
Every seed the Steam guide classifies, so you can look up the one you own. Find your number below, then swap it into the CSFloat link at the end of this page to see what else is listed on it. A seed that appears in none of these lists is unclassified — 727 of the 1001 are, seed 303 among them.
The top four
490, 704, 148, 69
Rank 1 — 39 seeds
16, 48, 66, 67, 96, 111, 117, 159, 259, 263, 273, 297, 308, 321, 324, 341, 347, 370, 426, 461, 482, 517, 530, 567, 587, 674, 695, 723, 764, 772, 781, 790, 792, 843, 880, 885, 904, 948, 990
Rank 2 — 44 seeds
109, 116, 134, 158, 168, 225, 288, 338, 354, 356, 365, 386, 406, 433, 441, 483, 537, 542, 592, 607, 611, 651, 668, 673, 696, 701, 730, 743, 820, 846, 856, 857, 870, 876, 882, 898, 900, 925, 942, 946, 951, 953, 970, 998
Purple — 96 seeds
29, 31, 33, 43, 72, 85, 88, 99, 104, 105, 128, 133, 136, 139, 140, 146, 156, 172, 174, 176, 189, 216, 217, 249, 265, 290, 293, 310, 311, 322, 339, 340, 343, 363, 395, 404, 411, 437, 449, 451, 453, 458, 463, 487, 496, 509, 532, 550, 572, 574, 598, 599, 605, 606, 614, 621, 627, 631, 653, 666, 667, 672, 683, 707, 710, 717, 727, 734, 740, 750, 766, 778, 795, 800, 804, 806, 811, 815, 816, 817, 839, 842, 848, 849, 850, 862, 877, 891, 913, 926, 927, 944, 952, 969, 971, 989
Gold — 95 seeds
4, 6, 14, 24, 37, 74, 78, 79, 80, 87, 102, 103, 124, 132, 135, 144, 167, 177, 180, 181, 182, 184, 205, 243, 247, 248, 252, 256, 264, 269, 270, 277, 289, 292, 301, 323, 325, 334, 360, 362, 367, 374, 382, 392, 403, 428, 432, 443, 446, 466, 491, 492, 495, 505, 511, 527, 549, 555, 558, 564, 568, 577, 594, 604, 608, 623, 624, 629, 637, 638, 645, 646, 686, 692, 733, 735, 738, 746, 783, 798, 802, 803, 813, 837, 868, 887, 903, 907, 911, 914, 921, 923, 945, 986, 994
The guide's own heading calls the gold group 97 seeds; the list under it enumerates 95. No seed appears in two lists, and none of the top four is repeated in any of them.
What any of it costs
Careful here, because the Deagle's price ladder is unlike anything else you will have priced.
Factory New is a cliff, not a step. FN runs about $45, Minimal Wear about $2.43, Field-Tested about $1.21, and Well-Worn and Battle-Scarred bottom out near a dollar. The pattern premium is quoted almost exclusively in Factory New, because that is where the buyers are: a Factory New 490 sold for $2,688 in October 2024, days after the skin launched, and that remains the loudest public sale on record for one.
Which cuts both ways. If you want the look and not the flex, a Field-Tested top-twenty seed is a dollar of base plus whatever the seller knows, and Heat Treated wears gracefully — the colour is anodising rather than a print, so a worn slide reads much like a clean one at a fortieth of the cost. If you want the asset, it is FN or nothing.
And no marketplace prices a seed. Every chart you will find, ours included, prices Desert Eagle | Heat Treated (Factory New) and stops there. A pattern premium is negotiated, never quoted.
Checking one yourself
The live population is one link away: seed 490 in the CSFloat database. The query is four numbers:
defIndex=1— the Desert Eagle.paintIndex=1054— the Heat Treated finish.paintSeed=— the pattern. Change this and nothing else.min=0&max=1— every float, because wear changes the colour far less than the seed does.
Then check the base before anyone quotes you a premium on top of it. Sync your inventory here and the plain skin is priced across four marketplaces daily; if you are the one selling, what each market takes in fees will move your number more than you expect on an item this cheap.
Sources
The tier lists are the community's Desert Eagle Heat Treated | Blue Gem guide on Steam by korenevskiy and Krieke. Release and availability details come from Valve's Armory update and the marketplace write-ups that followed it; base prices are from CSGOSKINS.GG. The $2,688 Factory New 490 sale was reported by trader MEWO in October 2024. Every colour percentage on this page is our own, counted off the pattern colour data this site runs on, which measures each of the 1001 seeds pixel by pixel. The four first-person screenshots are framed identically so that the seed is the only thing changing between them. Prices are as of August 2026 and will not stay true.