War Paint Mechanics
Grades & rarity explained
Every war-painted (Decorated) weapon in Team Fortress 2 carries a grade. Grade is a rarity tier — it tells you how often that weapon turns up relative to the rest of its collection, and it sets the baseline for what the item is worth before wear and quality come into play. There are six grades; here is what each one means.
The six grades, rarest to most common
- Elite The rarest Decorated grade — the chase of any set that has it.
- Assassin Second-rarest; only appears in the deeper sets.
- Commando The top of the four-rung sets; an uncommon pull.
- Mercenary The mid-tier workhorse, and the base grade of the deeper sets.
- Freelance One step up; still a frequent pull.
- Civilian The most common tier — the broad base of most sets.
The colours above are TF2's own grade colours — the same ones you see on the border of a Decorated item and on every card in the catalog.
What rarity looks like in real data
Rarity is not an abstract label. Across the 8 classic collections written up on this site — 158 war-painted weapons in total — the grades are spread very unevenly. The Elite and Assassin tiers are a small fraction of the pool, while the common grades carry most of the weight:
- Elite 9
- Assassin 13
- Commando 31
- Mercenary 45
- Freelance 23
- Civilian 37
Figures are counted live from CheckPaint's collection dataset, so they reflect exactly what the site ships. Note that Mercenary is the largest pool here because it is the base grade of the deeper sets — a reminder that "rarest" always means rarest within a set's ladder.
Two grade ladders
The classic sets fall into two ladder shapes. One family runs Civilian → Freelance → Mercenary → Commando and tops out at Commando. The other runs Mercenary → Commando → Assassin → Elite, adding the two scarce tiers on top. Knowing which ladder a set uses tells you immediately how rare its chase pieces really are: a Commando piece is the top of a four-rung set but only the upper-middle of a six-rung one.
See the split in action on the collections hub, which groups every set by its ladder family.
How grade affects value
Grade sets the floor, not the final price. A rarer grade means fewer copies entering the economy, which generally supports a higher baseline — but the same weapon can swing widely depending on its wear tier, whether it is a plain Decorated copy or a Strange one that tracks kills, and how well the pattern is centred. In practice you read grade first to understand the scarcity, then layer wear and quality on top.
Grade is not quality
One common mix-up: grade and quality are different axes. Grade (Civilian … Elite) is about how rare the war paint is. Quality — Unique, Strange, and the various unusual/effect lines — is a separate property layered on top. A high-grade paint can be a plain Unique, and a low-grade paint can be a sought-after Strange; the two combine rather than replace each other.