How pricing works: markup, rounding, and customer patience Community-sourced

Pricing is the core loop of TCG Card Shop Simulator: every pack you shelve needs a number on it, and that number decides whether you grow or stall. Here's what has actual sources behind it — and where the verified line ends.

The one rule: price from market, not from memory

Every product has a market price the game shows you. Your job is picking a markup over that price — big enough to grow, small enough that customers still pay. Set prices with the pricing calculator and the arithmetic is handled.

How market price actually moves (the mechanic)

From the community wiki's TCG Price page (documented during Early Access; page last edited October 2024 — treat as "likely unchanged in 1.0, not re-verified"):

• Market prices recalculate once per night. The price tag you see in the morning is last night's calculation.
• Each night, every item has a 40% chance to change by 0.8%–2%, up or down with even odds.
• Play-table events push the event's cards by 0.2%–5% in either direction — hosting events literally moves your market.
• Prices mean-revert: if an item drifts more than ~25% from its initial value, a corrective swing becomes possible, and values are hard-capped between 20% and 200% of the initial price.

The practical takeaway: reprice each morning before opening. Yesterday's tags age overnight whether you touch them or not — which is why restock-and-reprice is one routine, not two.

How far can you push the markup?

What's sourced: the community's working range is +10% to +20% over market, lowering prices when complaints or slow sales show up (multiple independent guides agree). One creator's Early-Access measurement put purchase chance at roughly 90% at market price, dropping to ~75% "above market" — directionally useful, not a verified curve.

What isn't: nobody has published an exact refusal threshold — not the wiki, not any guide we could find as of 2026-10-01. Anyone quoting "the magic number" is guessing. The honest tool for this is the calculator's check-a-price card, where you set the threshold and watch your own shop's behavior against it.

Rounding and the till

Community practice is to round shelf prices — to $0.50 or the nearest dollar — for faster checkouts and fewer fiddly change moments. Whether the current version actually rewards this mechanically is unverified; it costs little and reads cleaner either way. The calculator offers every rounding style so you can pick your own convention.

A worked example (illustrative numbers, not game data)

Say a Standard pack shows a market price of $4.00 and you pay $2.40 for it:

If shoppers refuse $4.60 but buy $4.50 all day, the rounding didn't cost you much and bought a lot of goodwill. That trade — a few cents of markup for faster, happier sales — is the whole game at this layer.

Before you shelve anything: the 30-second check

1. What's the market price right now?
2. What did I pay for it?
3. Pick a markup in the calculator → shelf price.
4. Did the last batch at this price actually sell? If not, drop the markup before you blame demand.

Sources & version notes

• Game version: 1.0, launched 2026-09-15 (SteamDB; see our changelog).
• wiki.gg — TCG Price: nightly recalculation, 40%/±0.8–2% nightly drift, play-table events ±0.2–5%, 25% mean-reversion, 20%–200% caps. Documented during Early Access (page edited Oct 2024) — not yet re-verified in 1.0.
• GameRant — customer dissatisfaction and money guide: the +10–20% community range; the 90%→75% purchase-chance observation is single-source Early-Access footage.
• No published refusal threshold exists as of 2026-10-01 — that's a statement about the public record, not a guess of our own.

Where to next

• The pricing calculator — do the math for you.
• Open packs or sell them sealed? — the other money decision.
• Starter guide: your first days — putting this into a routine.

Unofficial fan page. Not affiliated with OPNeon Games. Community-sourced facts are labeled with their tier and access date in the changelog.