Cards

Introduction

Cards are the product, the collection and the currency of TCG Card Shop Simulator all at once, and the same card can be worth wildly different amounts depending on how it was printed. Every card belongs to a creature, one of four elements, and one of six border prints, and that border is what separates a bulk common from the reason a collector walks into your shop with a full wallet. The 1.0 build ships 4,436 collectible cards, and the pull rates between border tiers are steep enough that the difference between keeping a Full Art and selling it can fund a week of restocking. This hub covers what Basic, Rare, Epic and Legendary mean in practice, how the black, First Edition, Silver, Gold, EX and Full Art borders are identified at a glance, how Foil states stack on top of any of them, and which pulls are worth grading rather than moving straight to a customer.

Border & Pull Rate Overview

Print Breakdown

Core Mechanics

A card in this game is defined by three things that are decided when it is pulled: the creature it belongs to, its element, and its border print. Element matters for deck building and for which cup events push its price up, but the border print is what drives value. The black Base border is the standard print and the baseline everything else is measured against. First Edition adds a white line inside the border and is the classic chase variant for set collectors. Silver and Gold replace the border with a metallic finish and pull far less often. EX uses a purple border with a yellow inner line. Full Art drops the border entirely. Foil is not a border at all but a state that can stack on top of any print, and a foil version of a rare border is usually the most valuable single card in a fresh box. Rarity labels (Basic, Rare, Epic, Legendary) describe how a card is treated by the game's pack distribution, while the border is what you actually look at when deciding whether a pull goes on the shelf or into the collection book.

Advantages

Understanding the border system pays off twice over, because it improves both your pricing and your collection decisions. On the pricing side, knowing which prints are scarce lets you price a single confidently against the market instead of guessing, and lets you recognise when a customer is paying well above what you expected. On the collection side, it stops you selling the one card in a box that was worth keeping. The system is also legible at a glance: once you know that First Edition adds an inner white line, that EX is purple with a yellow line, and that Full Art has no border at all, you can sort a fresh box in seconds without consulting an app. Foil states add a second dimension that is easy to miss, since a foil version of an unremarkable print can outvalue a plain card two tiers above it. Because element also matters for deck building and for cup events, a card's real worth to you depends on whether you intend to sell it, grade it, or put it in a Tetramon deck, and this hub gives you the information to make that call consistently.

Challenges

The border system is legible once you know it, but the odds behind it are not official. The pull-rate figures circulating for Basic, Rare, Epic, Legendary and the six border prints come from community testing on the wiki rather than from the developer, and they were not re-verified against the 1.0 build, so they should be treated as indicative rather than exact. That matters most when you are deciding whether to open sealed product or sell it, because expected value calculations built on stale odds will be wrong in the same direction every time. There is also a practical ceiling on what a card is worth to you: market value moves with events and trends, so a single card priced today can be worth meaningfully less tomorrow if an event depresses its category, and holding stock through a downturn ties up cash you could have spent on faster-moving product. Finally, collecting competes directly with selling, since a card in your collection book is a card you cannot put on a shelf, so a complete Full Art set is an expensive goal rather than a free one.

Frequently Asked Questions

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