The 10% market tax: the math every trader should know

When you sell a card, the game keeps 10% of the sale price and hands you the other 90%. List a card for 10,000 stubs and it sells, and 1,000 stubs vanish to tax — you receive 9,000. The tax is taken from the seller, on the full sale price, every single time. Buying costs you exactly what you pay; selling always costs you a tenth.

Because you only keep 90% of a sale, the price you sell at has to clear both your cost and the tax before you make a stub. The break-even sell price is your buy cost divided by 0.9:

• Buy a card for 9,000 → you must sell for at least 10,000 just to get your stubs back (9,000 ÷ 0.9 = 10,000).
• Buy for 20,000 → break-even is ~22,223.
• Buy for 50,000 → break-even is ~55,556.

Anything you sell above that break-even line is real profit; anything below it is a loss, even if the number looks higher than what you paid. A quick rule of thumb: the gap between buy and sell has to be bigger than about 11% of your buy price before you’re in the green.

The headline spread on the market — the buy-now price minus the lowest sell order — looks like instant profit, but it ignores the tax entirely. Buy a card at its 9,000 sell order and immediately list it at the 10,000 buy-now and you haven’t made 1,000 stubs; you’ve made almost nothing, because the 10,000 sale only pays you 9,000. Half of the “obvious” flips that beginners chase are spreads that the tax quietly erases. The spread has to be wide enough to survive the 10% cut and still leave a profit worth your time.

Every card has a quick-sell value — a fixed price the game will always pay you for it, no buyer required and no market tax. That number is the floor under your downside. If a card’s quick-sell is higher than its current market sell order, you have a flip with a built-in guarantee: worst case, you quick-sell and still come out ahead. The flips page flags these as “QS Viable,” and the Flips & ROI guide covers how to read that column.

When you list a card, work backwards from the take-home stubs you want, not the sticker price. Decide what you need to net, then divide by 0.9 to find the price to list at. If you want 18,000 stubs in hand, list at 20,000. And remember the buyer is doing the same math in reverse — overprice past the buy-now and your card just sits there while cheaper sell orders fill first.

1. 1On flips, the Profit column is already net of the 10% tax — it’s the number that actually lands in your stub balance, not the raw spread.
2. 2ROI expresses that after-tax profit as a percentage of your buy cost, so you can compare a cheap flip against an expensive one fairly.
3. 3Sort by ROI to find the spreads wide enough to beat the tax, then check the price chart on the card detail page to confirm the gap is stable, not a one-hour blip.