Guides

Introduction

The guides hub is where every TCG Card Shop Simulator run starts, because the opening week is the part that actually ends saves. A shop that opens with the wrong stock, an over-tight shelf layout or a greedy price tag will bleed money on electricity and counter fees long before the collection starts paying for itself. These guides walk the full arc in order: the first wholesale order, the pricing maths behind a sale, hiring your first worker, and the point where flipping sealed product becomes less profitable than cracking it. Each guide is written around decisions rather than trivia, so you can read one, change one thing in your shop, and see the difference on the next in-game day. Where a number comes from community testing on the Mechanics and Formulas pages we say so, and where it comes from the 1.0 patch notes we say that too, so you always know how much to trust a figure.

Guide Track Quick Reference

Guide Tracks

Core Mechanics

Every run follows the same underlying loop, and the guides are ordered around it. You start with a small amount of cash, a bare shop and an empty sales floor. The Stock Order app is where you buy wholesale: sealed booster boxes and packs are cheapest by the case, and everything you buy has to be carried to a shelf or display before a customer will consider it. Once product is out, you set your own prices, and the buy chance falls as your price rises above the market value reported by the TCG Price app, which is what makes a markup decision rather than a formality. Sales generate experience as well as cash, and shop level gates almost everything else: better furniture, more floor space, worker unlocks and higher-value product lines. Underneath all of it runs a fixed cost layer of electricity per real minute plus a flat daily fee for every checkout counter you own, so a shop that stops selling still loses money. The beginner track deliberately front-loads the survival decisions, and the later tracks assume you can keep the doors open.

Advantages

The guides hub is organised around the actual failure points rather than around the order the menus appear in, which means it answers the questions new players search for first. Because every guide is written around a decision, you can apply it immediately: change a markup, move a shelf, delay an expansion, and watch the next in-game day respond. The tracks are also honest about confidence. Numbers taken from the 1.0 patch notes are stated plainly, while figures that come from community testing on the Mechanics and Formulas pages are labelled as community-reported and dated, so you know which ones to re-check after a patch. The beginner track deliberately covers the first week in isolation, because the mistakes that end runs happen early and cheaply if you catch them, and expensively if you do not. Later tracks assume survival and move on to throughput, staffing and the point where cracking packs beats selling them sealed. Between them they cover the full arc of a shop, from a bare floor and a small float to a staffed store with tables turning over income every hour.

Challenges

The main limitation of any written guide for this game is that a meaningful share of the underlying numbers is community-reported rather than confirmed in-game. Pull rates, grading probabilities and the exact buy-chance curve come from the community wiki's Mechanics and Formulas pages, and some of those pages were last edited during Early Access, so a 1.0 patch can invalidate them without anyone updating the source. The other structural caveat is that this game is a simulation with a lot of interacting systems, which means advice is conditional: the best first purchase depends on your shop level, your existing stock and whether a play table is running. Guides that hand you a single optimal sequence are usually describing one player's save. Finally, because version 1.0 is recent, there is very little community documentation of the new systems at all, so anything involving Ascension cards, tournaments or the playable Tetramon format should be verified in your own save rather than trusted from a guide written about an earlier build.

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