If you’re trying to unlock Grading Master in TCG Card Shop Simulator, there’s an important detail that makes this achievement much easier than it might initially seem.
You do not need to have 500 Grade 10 cards sitting in your binder at the same time.
What matters is the number of Grade 10 cards you have received back from grading over the course of your game.
Even better, Grade 10 cards that have already been graded can be sent back to the grader. If they come back as Grade 10 again, they count toward the achievement again.
That changes the best strategy quite a bit.
Grade 10 Regrading Is More Efficient
An ungraded card has a 38.4% chance of coming back as a Grade 10.
For a card that has already been graded, the regrading chances are:
- 30% — Grade increases by 1
- 41% — Grade stays the same
- 29% — Grade decreases by 1
That means a Grade 10 card has a 71% chance of coming back as Grade 10, because it cannot increase any further.
That’s much better than the 38.4% chance you get from an ungraded card.
So if you want to reach Grading Master quickly, you can start by sending ungraded cards to grading and collecting the Grade 10s that come back.
Once you have Grade 10 cards, send those Grade 10s back to grading.
At the same time, fill your shipments with more ungraded cards so you can generate additional Grade 10s.
Then repeat the process.
Don’t Regrade Lower Grades Just for Grade 10
If your goal is specifically to get Grade 10 cards for Grading Master, regrading lower grades isn’t necessarily the best use of your grading slots.
Even a Grade 9 only has a 30% chance of becoming a Grade 10.
An ungraded card has a 38.4% chance of becoming a Grade 10.
So, if you have a Grade 9 and an ungraded card available, you’re generally better off grading the ungraded card if your only goal is producing more Grade 10s.
The Method I Used
When I went for the achievement, I graded high-value cards using the 2-day service.
Anything that didn’t come back as a Grade 10 was immediately put up for sale. Most of the Grade 10 cards were sent back to grading, apart from a few particularly valuable ones that I decided to sell.
Selling a card worth around $30,000 can pay for the next two shipments, so selling lower-grade high-value cards can help fund the process.
The difference in value between Grade 10 and Grade 9 can also be very large, which makes the strategy worthwhile.
Part of the reason this worked well for me was that my shop was already around level 102 when the graded-card achievements were introduced. I already had a healthy bankroll, so the faster service wasn’t a problem.
But you don’t need to have that kind of money.
You Don’t Need the 2-Day Service
If the 2-day grading service is too expensive, simply use whichever service you can afford.
The grading odds are the same regardless of the service.
The cheaper service will obviously take longer, but you’ll save a significant amount of money.
I wasn’t even completely focused on Grading Master when deciding which cards to send. I used the 4-day service several times as well.
From 100 Grade 10 cards to 500 Grade 10 cards, it took me only 43 in-game days.
For comparison, if you were starting with ungraded cards and using the 2-day service, getting 400 additional Grade 10 cards would take around 65 days on average, assuming average luck.
So don’t feel like you have to spend all your money on the fastest service.
Obsessed with Grades
The Obsessed with Grades achievement works very differently.
You need to collect 10 copies of the exact same card, with one copy at every possible grade:
- Grade 1
- Grade 2
- Grade 3
- Grade 4
- Grade 5
- Grade 6
- Grade 7
- Grade 8
- Grade 9
- Grade 10
There are a few important requirements.
All 10 cards must be:
- The exact same card
- From the same edition
- From the same card set
- At different grades from 1 through 10
And you need to keep those cards.
Don’t sell one of them before the achievement triggers.
Most importantly, the cards need to be in your binder.
When Does Obsessed with Grades Unlock?
The achievement triggers when you open a box returning from grading, provided you already have the required 10 cards in your binder.
It’s possible that the achievement could also trigger if the box you’re opening contains the final missing grade, assuming the other nine cards are already in your binder.
But the safest approach is to make sure you have all 10 required cards in your binder before opening the box.
Pick a Common Card
The best way to approach this is to choose a cheap card that you have a lot of copies of.
Sort your collection by amount and look for a card where you have a large stack.
Then start sending copies of that exact card to grading.
Don’t accidentally start grading cards from two or more different stacks if you’re following this method. You want all the graded cards you’re working toward to come from the same card stack.
Low Grades Are the Problem
At first, getting Grades 8, 9, and 10 isn’t really the difficult part.
The real bottleneck is:
Grade 4, Grade 3, Grade 2, and Grade 1.
Grade 2 and Grade 1 are particularly uncommon, with each appearing less than 1 in 300 cards from the grading process.
Meanwhile, Grades 8, 9, and 10 make up around 80% of your grading results together.
If you simply keep sending fresh ungraded cards to grading, you’ll naturally collect plenty of the higher grades.
Eventually, you’ll probably have Grades 10 through 5.
The problem is that you could wait a very long time for the remaining low grades to naturally appear.
That’s where regrading becomes extremely useful.
Regrade Your Low Grades
Start keeping the lower-grade cards you receive.
Anything Grade 5 or lower is worth keeping for this strategy.
Once you have one copy of a particular grade, set it aside somewhere safe, such as a display, so you don’t accidentally send the only copy back for grading.
Then you can take your extra low-grade cards and send those back for another grading attempt.
The regrading chances are:
- 30% — Grade increases by 1
- 41% — Grade stays the same
- 29% — Grade decreases by 1
For example, if you have eight Grade 5 cards and send all eight back for grading, you would expect to get around two or three Grade 4 cards on average.
Then you can repeat the process with the lower grades.
Eventually, you work your way down through the grades until you have all 10 grades represented.
Just remember to pull one copy of every new grade aside once you get it.
Where Should You Stop Regrading?
I think a cutoff around Grade 5 or Grade 6 works well.
Personally, I used Grade 5 as my cutoff.
I didn’t claim that this is mathematically optimal. I simply preferred to use fresh ungraded cards instead of regrading Grade 6 cards whenever I needed more cards in the system.
It worked fine even with some pretty bad luck.
In fact, I never naturally received a Grade 1, Grade 2, or Grade 3 while working toward the achievement. I still managed to get the achievement relatively quickly by using the low-grade cards I did receive and regrading them.
So if your luck is terrible, don’t assume you’re stuck.
What If You Already Have a Grade 2?
Here’s a useful situation to understand.
Let’s say you’ve graded a bunch of ungraded cards and now have:
- Grades 10 through 6
- 12 × Grade 5
- 2 × Grade 4
- 1 × Grade 2
What should you do?
First, keep one Grade 5 aside for the achievement.
Then regrade the remaining Grade 5 cards, both Grade 4 cards, and the Grade 2 card.
The reason is simple: your goal is to eventually obtain a Grade 1.
If you set that Grade 2 aside permanently, you’ll have to wait until another Grade 2 appears before you can start trying to turn it into a Grade 1.
You’ll probably end up regrading a Grade 2 eventually anyway.
So you might as well start with the Grade 2 you already have.
It might feel risky to send away your only Grade 2, but it doesn’t actually put you in a worse position. It can save a lot of time.
Graded Gold
There is quite a bit of misleading information about the Graded Gold achievement, so there’s one important detail to understand first.
The achievement description says:
“Graded Gold: Sold graded card worth more than $100,000”
The wording can be misleading.
The important thing is the selling price, not necessarily the card’s market value.
You can therefore sell a card whose market value is below $100,000, as long as you actually sell it for $100,000 or more.
Here are the things you need to keep in mind.
1. You Need a Very Valuable Graded Card
Because you’re trying to reach a $100,000 selling price, you realistically need a graded Ghost Foil card.
A Grade 10 is very likely to be what you need.
There is a small possibility that a Grade 9 could be valuable enough, but I wouldn’t plan around that.
2. Open Destiny Packs
For this achievement, you want to open Destiny packs.
There are four Destiny pack types, and any of them can work.
If you’re opening Tetramon packs instead, you’re less likely to encounter a Ghost Foil.
So if Graded Gold is the goal, Destiny packs are the better route.
3. Pack Opening Is the Main Grind
When opening Destiny packs, you can expect to encounter a single Ghost Foil approximately every 10,000 packs on average.
There’s another possibility, though.
A God Pack, with a chance of approximately 1 in 100,000, can contain seven Ghost Foil cards.
That makes having a lot of pack-opening machines one of the main ways to speed up this achievement.
The more packs you’re opening, the more opportunities you have to hit that Ghost Foil.
4. Customers Can Trade Ghost Foils
Customers can also offer Ghost Foil cards through trades.
Whether you want to spend time checking those offers is up to you.
However, it’s possible to go through a streak of 40+ days without being offered a Ghost Foil, even when you have multiple counters.
For that reason, pack opening is the more reliable strategy.
Trades are more useful if you’re trying to min-max everything.
Personally, I’d rather add another pack-opening machine than spend all my time checking trades.
But you’re the boss of your shop.
5. Regrade Cards When Necessary
Remember the grading odds from earlier.
An ungraded card has a 38.4% chance of returning as a Grade 10.
You can also take a lower-grade card and regrade it, potentially multiple times, to eventually get a Grade 10.
For Graded Gold, regrading can be particularly worthwhile because you only need the right valuable card to reach the required selling price.
You can choose not to regrade anything, or you can regrade cards around Grade 5 and above.
If your first grading attempt doesn’t naturally give you a Grade 10, regrading becomes much more useful.
6. Use the Right Events
There are two play-table events that can help with card values.
One improves the value of Full Art cards, while the other improves the value of Foil cards.
Either one can help your Ghost Foil cards.
Don’t expect the event to suddenly make every Ghost Foil worth $200,000, though.
The point is more about maintaining good values across your cards and giving yourself a better chance of having a Ghost Foil reach the required price.
There are 40 different Ghost Foil cards, and if they’re Grade 10, roughly half or slightly more than half should be suitable candidates for Graded Gold when using these events.
7. Your Shop Level Matters
Finding the card is only half the problem.
You still need a customer wealthy enough to buy it.
A higher shop level helps because you’ll have more customers and, on average, richer customers.
Shop expansions also help.
You can technically try to sell a $100,000 card before level 50, but it may take a very long time to find someone who can afford it.
At level 80+, with the available expansions purchased at that point, selling a qualifying card for $100,000 is usually much easier and can often happen within a few days.
8. Don’t Price the Card Too High
There’s another important part of the pricing system.
Customers refuse to buy cards when they’re priced 60% above market value.
That means trying to sell a card worth $60,000 for $100,000 won’t work.
A more reasonable minimum value for a $100,000 asking price is around $77,000, because $100,000 is less than 30% above that value.
You can still try with a $70,000 card if you want.
You don’t lose anything by putting it up for sale and waiting.
But expecting a $70,000 card to sell immediately for $100,000 is optimistic.
Once the card is worth around $84,000 or more, selling it for $100,000 becomes much easier because the markup is below 20%.
The customer still needs enough money, of course.
9. Watch Your Employees
Be careful with employees whose job is to set prices.
They can overwrite the $100,000 price tag you’ve manually put on the card.
If you’re attempting Graded Gold, you may want to temporarily unassign that task.
It can also be worth making a hard save at the beginning of each day, just in case something goes wrong.
And if you accidentally mess up the price, don’t blame Zackery.
He’s apparently working for you 13 hours a day, 365 days a year, for $18,000.
10. Your Currency Can Change the Target
The $100,000 target depends on the currency you’re using.
If you’re using USD, there isn’t an issue.
Canadian dollars are also fine.
But Australian dollars are different because everything is worth roughly twice as much and costs roughly twice as much.
Changing your currency doesn’t let you cheat the achievement.
So, for Australian dollar users, the equivalent target is around $200,000.
If you’re unsure about your currency’s exchange rate, you can use the game’s prices as a reference.
For example, in USD, the cheapest employee costs $50 per day, while a basic play table costs $200.
If those aren’t the prices you’re seeing, your currency has a different exchange rate, so you’ll need to apply that conversion to the $100,000 target.
My Graded Gold Example
I recently started a new shop specifically to get an idea of how difficult Graded Gold really is.
The result was pretty interesting.
By Day 54, my shop was level 66, and I had not one but three Grade 10 Ghost Foil cards.
Their values were:
- $81,000
- $84,000
- $100,000
I had other Ghost Foils as well, but they weren’t valuable enough to be good Graded Gold candidates.
And I never found a God Pack containing seven Ghost Foils during that game.
So these three cards weren’t the result of some ridiculous amount of luck.
I was simply ending my days once the shop was empty and opening the shop again the next day after restocking.
I wasn’t artificially extending my days and opening an absurd number of packs every day.
Selling the Three Cards
On Day 54, at level 66, I put all three cards up for $100,000 each.
A customer came into the shop and bought two of them at once.
I honestly didn’t know a single customer could spend $200,000 on cards in one visit, so that was a surprise.
The following day, when my shop had reached level 67, another customer came in and purchased the remaining $100,000 card.
That completed the achievement.
A Simple Setup for Graded Gold
If you’re not particularly interested in selling lots of other cards while you’re working on Graded Gold, there’s a simple strategy you can use.
Put down one card table and place only your $100,000 card on it.
That way, customers who are interested in buying single cards will be directed toward your valuable card.
Most customers won’t be able to afford it.
But that’s okay.
You’re waiting for the occasional wealthy customer — the millionaire who walks into your shop and actually has enough money to buy it.
If you have 100 other cards for sale at the same time, you can end up wasting opportunities because potential buyers might never look at the valuable card.
With only your expensive card available, you make sure the customers who are interested in single cards at least get a chance to see it.
Final Tips for the Three Achievements
The three achievements reward very different approaches.
For Grading Master, take advantage of the fact that Grade 10 cards have a 71% chance of staying Grade 10 when regraded. Use fresh ungraded cards to generate more 10s, then repeatedly regrade the 10s.
For Obsessed with Grades, choose one cheap card that you own in large quantities. Keep one copy of every grade you obtain and use the excess low-grade cards to work your way toward the grades that are hardest to find naturally.
For Graded Gold, focus on Destiny packs, maximize your pack-opening capacity, look after your Ghost Foils, use grading and regrading when appropriate, and make sure your $100,000 price tag isn’t overwritten.
Most importantly, don’t panic if RNG is terrible for a while.
The low grades can take a long time to appear naturally, and Ghost Foils can take a huge number of packs. The trick is to use the systems around the RNG instead of simply hoping the perfect result appears.
Good luck with the achievements, and have fun building your card shop.