Every Dota 2 profile shows a medal, and every account listing leads with a
number. They are the same thing seen from two sides: the medal is a bracket of
solo MMR, and Valve publishes where the brackets fall. Here is the whole ladder
in one table, followed by what it means when the account is one you are about
to buy rather than one you are climbing.
| medal | solo MMR | stars |
|---|
| Herald | 0 – 769 | five stars, 154 MMR each |
| Guardian | 770 – 1 539 | five stars |
| Crusader | 1 540 – 2 309 | five stars |
| Archon | 2 310 – 3 079 | five stars |
| Legend | 3 080 – 3 849 | five stars |
| Ancient | 3 850 – 4 619 | five stars |
| Divine | 4 620 – 5 419 | five stars |
| Immortal | 5 420 and up | no stars — a leaderboard rank instead |
Each medal below Immortal is split into five stars of roughly 154 MMR. The
stars are cosmetic in the sense that matters here: a Crusader 1 and a Crusader
5 are matched from the same pool and priced the same on the account market.
Immortal has no stars because it has no ceiling — above 5 420 the rank is a
position on the regional leaderboard, recalculated after every game.
Two details that trip people up. First, the medal on your profile is the
highest you reached that season, not your current rating; the number under
it is current. When you buy an account, the number is what you are buying.
Second, since Valve retired the separate core/support ratings, there is one
solo MMR per account, and that is the figure every honest listing shows.
The distribution of players across medals is a well-known bell curve with its
hump around Crusader and Archon. The distribution of accounts for sale is
not the same curve, and the difference tells you something about the market.
On our own shelf, right now, by medal — the counts and medians below are
read from the live catalogue when the page loads:
| medal | listings | median |
|---|
| Herald | | |
| Guardian | | |
| Crusader | | |
| Archon | | |
| Legend | | |
| Ancient | | |
| Divine | | |
| Immortal | | |
Read the listings column top to bottom: the low medals hold most of the
shelf, and the top medals hold a handful. That is not where most players
are; it is where most second accounts are. People sell the account they
calibrated and stopped playing, and the account they stopped playing is
usually a low one. If you are shopping for a Divine or Immortal main, a
marketplace is a place you check occasionally, not a shelf you browse.
The account market prices medals in two regimes.
Below Ancient, the medal barely moves the price. Read the median column in
the table above: the low medals do not even sort in order — the cheapest row
is not the lowest medal — and the steps between them are small next to the
steps at the top. The reason is that a few hundred MMR in the low brackets is a difference in
how the account was calibrated, not in what it contains — and what it contains
is what buyers pay for: the Steam account around the game (its age, its level,
CS2 Prime beside Dota), the inventory (arcanas, immortals, personas), and a
played history that survives Valve's smurf checks. We measured this in how
much is my Dota 2 account worth:
solo MMR was the fifth-best predictor of price, behind inventory, Steam level,
wins and matches.
From Ancient upward the rating carries a premium of its own, and Divine and
Immortal accounts are rare enough to be priced one at a time. That is the
second regime, and it is the only one where the medal is the headline.
So the practical rule: below Ancient, shop by what is on the Steam account and
by the behavior score; from Ancient, shop by the medal and then by those
things. The medal shelves exist for the second regime and for
anyone who simply wants to start in a specific bracket — Herald
for a clean second account, Crusader for a played one,
Archon and Legend for a bracket of your
own, Ancient and Divine where the rating
begins to cost money.
The medal tells you who you will be matched against in skill. It says
nothing about who you will be matched with in conduct, and that is decided
by a separate hidden score with a cap of 12 000. Two accounts with the same
medal and behavior scores of 4 000 and 11 000 play in different games —
literally different lobbies, filled from different pools.
On the account market this matters more than the medal in the low brackets,
because a low score is the one thing on a card that playing well does not fix
quickly. It moves by a handful of points per game and takes hundreds of games
to climb. We keep a shelf for 8 000+ behavior score for
that reason, and the case for filtering on it before the rating is in the
behavior score guide.
Valve has banned smurfing explicitly since 2023, and the enforcement works on
patterns rather than confessions: an account whose games stop matching its
rating gets flagged. A bought Legend account piloted by a Crusader-level player
produces exactly that pattern — a rating that suddenly loses far more than it
wins — and the account can be lost with no warranty covering it, ours
included.
The honest version of "buy a higher account" is therefore: buy the bracket you
can hold. Play at Archon, buy Archon. It is also cheaper, which is not a
coincidence — the market has already priced in who can keep what.
Some sellers advertise «uncalibrated» accounts: ranked unlocked, placement
games not played, so the buyer decides the bracket. Every account on our shelf
is calibrated and shows its rating, because an uncalibrated account is a
promise about the future and a calibrated one is a fact about the present.
If you want the clean-slate effect, the Herald bracket is the closest honest
equivalent: calibrated low, with nothing on the account that your own games
have to live up to.
- Medals are MMR brackets; the numbers above are Valve's, the stars are
cosmetic for a buyer.
- On a marketplace shelf the low medals hold most of the listings and the
top medals a handful — the table above prints the live counts.
- Below Ancient the medal barely prices the account; the Steam account,
inventory and behavior score do. From Ancient it starts to.
- Buy the bracket you can hold. Valve bans the pattern of an account whose
games stop matching its rating, and no warranty covers that.
The Dota 2 shelf shows every account with its solo MMR, its
behavior score and its inventory value read from the account data, and the
value calculator prices any account against those live
listings.
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