About ★ Karambit | Case Hardened
The ★ Karambit | Case Hardened in Field-Tested is the wear tier where pattern-driven value carries the deepest discount — a tier-1 blue gem in FT trades on pattern premium with the wear effectively factored out of the asking price for elite seeds. From the Arms Deal Collection (August 2013), the Karambit Case Hardened is the originating pattern-hunting knife, and FT copies remain a major segment of total Karambit Case Hardened volume because the price-to-pattern access opens here.
Pattern dominance in FT
For Karambit Case Hardened, the visible wear adds texture to the play face but doesn't touch the colour distribution. A Tier-1 Blue Gem at FT (high-blue play face, contamination-free spine, clean tip) still commands a multiple of an average-pattern FN — the seed entry in the pattern hierarchy dwarfs the wear tier discount. For pattern-first traders, FT is where serious blue-gem hunting happens because the price entry opens versus higher wear tiers.
What FT changes visually
Field-Tested introduces visible wear scratches across the case-hardened surface, mostly clustering on the spine and play-face edges. The colour patches retain saturation, but the surface picks up the dulled-metal cast that defines the FT tier. For mid-pattern Karambit Case Hardened copies the FT price-discount versus MW is roughly proportional to the visual difference; for high-pattern copies, the discount narrows because the seed is doing the heavy lifting.
