ALTERNATE VERSIONS
Grandmaster and the Elders of the Universe occupied a different and bizarre position in the cosmic hierarchy of the Earth X universe. Here, they were survivors of the universe that existed before the Big Bang who wished to reinstate it somehow. However, a multiverse had been created by the devil Mephisto, who engineered the creation of Doctor Doom's time machine and used it to perpetually escape sideways in time, creating new timelines over and over again to avoid the inevitable judgment at the end of the universe that waited him. The Elders created a stopgap at the end of time, a Realm of the Dead that served as a single purgatory for the multiverse, collecting the various divergent aspects of living beings back into a single individual each, in anticipation of their plans to recreate the singular universe they came from.
In the reality of Earth-1815, the Grandmaster and the Collector observed the rise of superhumans on the planet Earth. They gambled over whether the superhumans would come to rule humanity or be subjugated by them. The rise of superhuman detention camps favored Grandmaster, but then the dimension-hopping team of heroes known as the Exiles arrived and freed the mutants, costing Grandmaster his wager. The infuriated Grandmaster decided to set a trap for the Exiles in revenge. He scoured the multiverse until he found Earth-33629, where cosmic chance supported six native heroes identical in appearance and basic temperament to the multi-dimensional Exiles 
he observed. Posing as the Timebroker, he gathered these six as the Exiles and earned their trust by guiding them against various threats to their Earth, in an effort to draw the attention of the original Exiles. To gain permission to act in this way from his own local doppelganger, Grandmaster-1815 made a wager with Grandmaster-33629 that his Exiles would be victorious against the other heroes once they arrived. When the match finally took place, however, the two teams of Exiles managed to see through his manipulations and refused to fight each other. The angry Grandmaster struck them dead, unthinkingly violating the terms of his wager with his counterpart. The local Grandmaster and Elders of the Universe expelled the foreign Grandmaster from their universe, restored his victims and sent them on their way.