Dota 2 ranks and MMR brackets explained: every medal, its numbers, and what an account in it is for

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.

The ladder, with numbers

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.

Where the accounts actually are

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 on 6 September 2026 — 229 Dota 2 listings with a calibrated rating:

Almost half the shelf is Guardian, and Guardian plus Crusader is nearly three quarters. 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. The top three medals together hold six listings. If you are shopping for a Divine main, a marketplace is a place you check occasionally, not a shelf you browse.

Why the medal is the wrong thing to shop by below Archon

The account market prices medals in two regimes.

Below Archon, the medal barely moves the price. On the shelf above, Herald and Guardian accounts carry the same median, and Crusader sits only a step higher. 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 Archon upward the rating starts to carry a premium of its own, and from Ancient the 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 Archon, shop by what is on the Steam account and by the behavior score; from Archon, 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 where the rating begins to cost money.

The number that is not on the medal: behavior score

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.

Buying above your bracket: the risk is not the rating, it is the ban

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.

Uncalibrated accounts, and why we do not list them

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.

The short version

• Medals are MMR brackets; the numbers above are Valve's, the stars are cosmetic for a buyer.
• On a marketplace shelf three quarters of accounts are Guardian or Crusader, and the top three medals are a handful of listings.
• Below Archon the medal barely prices the account; the Steam account, inventory and behavior score do. From Archon 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.