Marketplace

Every card in Arcanum can be sold to another player. Prices are set by the people holding the cards, the whole sale history is public, and the game itself holds both sides of every deal. This guide covers how to use that.

Listing a card

Pick a copy, name a price in coins, list it. The card is held while the listing is live and comes straight back if you cancel.

A sale takes a 10% commission. The seller receives the price minus that cut, and the commission is destroyed rather than paid to anyone — it exists to take coins out of the economy, not to fund a house.

One copy can only carry one live listing at a time. If your ask happens to meet a standing request that is already at or above it, the card sells immediately at your price and never becomes a listing at all.

Cards made in the Workshop pay their creator a 5% royalty on every resale, minted on top of the sale rather than deducted from either side.

Buy orders

A buy order is the other half of the book: a standing request for a specific card at a price you name. The coins are frozen when you place it and refunded in full if you cancel.

Two things can fill it. A card owner can sell you their copy directly from the order, or a new listing can cross it. When a listing crosses a request, the deal settles at the listing's price, not the request's — so an order placed at 20 000 that meets a lot at 15 000 pays 15 000, and the difference is returned immediately.

Placing an order also checks the shelf first. If a lot is already sitting there at or below your price, you simply buy it and no order is created.

Buying several at once

The bulk buy sheet takes the cheapest lots of one card, up to fifty at a time, in a single transaction. You can set a per-card price ceiling, and the preview shows how many will actually buy and what the total comes to.

Partial fills are the default rather than a failure. If the money runs out or the next lot is above your ceiling, the purchase stops there and you get what was affordable, with a single summary notification instead of fifty.

What the prices tell you

Every completed sale writes a row of price history against the card, and the marketplace shows the average, the minimum live ask and the number of lots on the shelf.

Sales are checked for outliers as they land. A price more than three times, or less than a third of, the median of that card's last twenty sales is flagged and excluded from every average and valuation. That is not cosmetic — it is what stops two accounts from inventing a price by trading a card between themselves.

Direct trades

A trade is a two-sided offer: cards and coins from each side, agreed before anything moves. The game holds both halves of it. Neither side can withdraw the goods once the offer is out, and acceptance moves everything at once, so there is no window in which one party is holding the bag.

Trading requires level 10 on both sides. The composer warns you when a limited card is involved, since those are the ones a bad deal is expensive on.

The rules that keep it honest

A handful of guards apply everywhere in the economy, and they are worth knowing before they surprise you.

• Coins only. There is no cash-out. Coins and gems have no value outside the game, which is what keeps the market a game economy rather than a payment system.
• A newly obtained card is locked for 48 hours before it can be listed, traded or sold into an order. It stops a stolen or freshly farmed account from being emptied in one pass. The lock only applies to deals a new account is part of: once every player in the deal has been here for a month, the card arrives free to use.
• A card busy elsewhere cannot be sold. Cards on an expedition, inside a pending trade, in the forge, or already listed are refused rather than quietly pulled out from under the other thing.
• Account-bound cards never enter the market. Cards from paid exclusives and from essence-priced banner pulls carry a permanent lock. It also blocks crafting and expeditions for them, which is the price of the guarantee.
• Transfers wear the card. Every change of hands marks a copy slightly, and wear is visible and lowers disenchant value. The Trader's bench is the only way back.

When something goes wrong

Both sides of every sale get a Telegram receipt. Rapid selling is collapsed into one summary message rather than a flood, so a bulk sale does not bury your notifications.

If a deal genuinely misfired, the support chat linked from the bot is the place to raise it. Sales are atomic server-side, so the common cases — a race for the last lot, a cancel landing at the same moment as a buy — resolve to exactly one outcome rather than two.