TCG Card Shop Simulator Beginner Guide: Your First 10 Days

Day one: the only thing that matters is turnover

You open with Basic Card Packs, which need no license, and a very small shop. The temptation is to open everything you buy. Resist it for a few days: cards you open are cards you are not selling, and early on you need working capital more than you need a collection.

Set prices at roughly 10% over market and round them to whole dollars. You are running the register by hand at this stage, and counting change on a $12.37 sale is slower than on a $13 sale. That sounds trivial until you notice how the shop actually works: no more than 28 people can be inside at once, and a new shopper only walks in when an existing one leaves. A slow register does not just cost you seconds, it stops the door.

The first purchases, in order

1. A second shelf before anything decorative. An empty shelf is a lost sale twice over — shoppers who spawn with a target list walk to a random shelf and give up if the item is not out.
2. Cleanser at level 2. Smelly customers are a rating hit, and rating is what later gates tournament attendance.
3. A Play Table at level 3 ($200). It earns rent whether you use it or not, and it is the only furniture that unlocks the event system.
4. Card Table at level 3 ($400). Ten card slots is where your first valuable singles go on sale.
5. Licenses over luxuries. Rare packs at level 5 cost $300 to license. That $300 opens a whole tier of higher-value stock; a display case does not.

The complete ladder is on the level unlocks page — every level, what it opens and what the licenses cost.

Level 10: the Workbench

The Workbench is $1,000 in MY DIY and it is the first purchase that genuinely changes the game. Before version 1.0 it did one thing: turned the pile of duplicates and commons clogging your binder into sellable bulk boxes. Since 1.0 it also holds the Tetramon rulebook and the deck editor.

Do a clear-out on a schedule rather than when storage is already full. Pull anything worth a single slot or a grading submission, feed the rest to the bench, and shelve the boxes.

Four mistakes that stall early saves

• Hoarding every card. A stuffed binder is frozen capital. Keep one copy of anything you might want later — selling your last copy removes it from the collection book entirely — and bulk the rest.
• Buying loose packs when boxes are cheaper. A box is 8 packs. Check the ordering app both ways before you commit; a case of boxes is sometimes priced below the equivalent packs outright.
• Flooding one product line. Over-supplying a line depresses its demand for days. The line will sit unsold even at 10% under market.
• Letting bills stack. Rent, power and wages accrue every day. Going far enough into the negative ends the run, so check the cash before you buy a $3,000 pack opener.

What to aim at next

By the time you are comfortable, the three systems worth learning are grading for turning good pulls into great ones, workers for getting off the register, and tournaments for turning play tables into an event business. The money guide covers the profit side in detail.