Facing certain defeat, Hawkeye distracted Grandmaster with a rigged game of chance long enough for Death to break free and cast Grandmaster out of her realm, condemning him and his fellow Elders to eternal life to prevent any of them from usurping her power again (an outcome Grandmaster had sought all along). A grateful Death restored the Avengers and the Silver Surfer to life as well .
Shortly after his resurrection, the Grandmaster acquired the Mind Gem. He and his fellow Elders soon conspired to destroy and supplant the cosmic being Galactus using the combined Infinity Gems, an act that would remake the universe in the process. But their plot failed, thanks in part to opposition from the Silver Surfer and Mantis, and Galactus vengefully consumed several Elders, including the Grandmaster. The devoured Elders were soon restored by Lord Chaos and Master Order, and they fled after helping Galactus and others defeat the rogue In-Betweener .
Later, Thanos sought the Infinity Gems and began taking them from the Elders until only the Grandmaster retained his Gem. By this time, Grandmaster, like Thanos himself, had begun to suspect the full power of the Gems. Studying and monitoring them, he allowed Thanos to steal the other Gems so that Grandmaster could steal them back later. Grandmaster challenged Thanos to a virtual reality war game for the Mind Gem’s possession, stipulating that Thanos would forfeit all his Gems if he lost. Grandmaster had programmed several cheats into the game to ensure his own victory, but Thanos outwitted him, sending a robotic duplicate of himself into the game instead. The true Thanos destroyed the game from the outside while Grandmaster’s mind was playing within it, reducing the Grandmaster to a shell of his former self .
Later restored, Grandmaster placed a wager on an galactic marathon race but lost when his fellow Elder the Runner was beaten by Eternal speedster Makkari, who had achieved new levels of speed. The Grandmaster offered to help Makkari adjust to his newly enhanced speed if he would spend the next 3,000 years participating in galactic, pangalactic, and universal races as Grandmaster’s champion, but Makkari declined.
Seeking to recover his lost Mind Gem, Grandmaster followed it to the “Ultraverse” alternate reality (Earth-93060), where the trickster Loki had amassed all six Infinity Gems. A seventh, previously unknown Infinity Gem, the Ego Gem, had possessed the Eternal adventurer Sersi, and through her it coerced the Grandmaster into distracting Loki with a game. If Loki won, Grandmaster would reveal the seventh Gem’s location, and if Grandmaster won, he would get his Mind Gem back.
Using Grandmaster’s “Worlds and Warriors” game, they pitted Earth-616’s Avengers and Earth-93060’s Ultraforce against each other in a tournament of champions. Loki declared victory based on a series of technicalities and Grandmaster conceded, after which the seventh Gem took Loki by surprise, merging with the other Gems to form the cosmic being Nemesis, who then remade reality in her image until she was defeated by Avengers and Ultraforce, with the Gems splitting apart.