About ★ Butterfly Knife | Stained
The ★ Butterfly Knife | Stained in Minimal Wear is the wood-stain finish on the Butterfly model — a pattern-seeded teal-and-brown wash that reads like ink on weathered timber. From the Bravo Collection (September 2013), Stained is one of the original CS:GO finishes, and on the Butterfly's flippable blade, the pattern variance is showcased dynamically during every inspect animation.
Stained pattern variance on Butterfly
The Stained pattern lottery is subtler than Case Hardened: the seed decides the distribution of dark teal-blue ink-pools against the lighter wood-brown background, with the trader-preferred copies showing a strong teal cluster centred on the play face. Lower-tier patterns wash out into mostly brown surfaces; tier-1 copies keep the teal dense and the contrast sharp. The Butterfly's flip animation surfaces both the obverse and reverse, so both faces influence pattern value here more than on fixed-blade knives.
Why MW is the working tier
Stained is a pattern that depends on colour contrast — teal against brown — and MW preserves that contrast at near-FN saturation. The wear at MW touches only the very edges of the painted surface; the ink-pool centres stay sharp. For traders building around a Stained pattern hunt, MW offers the same visual quality as FN at a meaningful price-tier discount. FN copies trade primarily on the float-bracket scarcity rather than on visual improvement.
