This page explains the full flow from account setup to imports, dashboard filters, matches, chat, and how pricing works behind the scenes.
If you just want the fastest setup, follow these steps in order and then come back to the deeper sections when you need more detail.
You can register with email and password or go straight in with Google or Facebook. Email signups need confirmation, while social sign-ins can usually continue right away.
After your first sign-in, CardSwap walks you through the short wizard for country, shipping range, cross-game trades, and optionally your public profile. If Facebook does not share an email, CardSwap asks for it once and then continues immediately.
In the import wizard, choose the game and target list first and then decide between single cards, a deck URL, or a pasted list. In the single-card search you can now also type a collector number such as "Lightning Bolt 332".
If a wishlist card can be any print, you can now turn on "Accept any edition" instead of adding every version by hand.
Then review your offers and wishlist in the dashboard, export your lists if needed, and enable your public profile link if you want to share your profile outside CardSwap as well.
If you still need ideas, start with Browse Offers, filter by game or card details, and push interesting prints straight into your wishlist. For actual reciprocal trades, switch to Matches and handle the rest in the built-in chat.
The import page now runs as a four-step wizard: choose the game and target list, pick the import path, prepare the cards, and review the import settings before submit. All cards from that run go into either your offers or your wishlist together.
Magic still supports deck URLs and pasted lists. Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh! use the same wizard with the staging queue, search suggestions, images, and cached pricing. The compact guide for this flow is hidden by default and can be reopened with the guide button in the navigation.
Start with the card name or include the collector number directly, for example "Lightning Bolt 332". Then choose the print, set finish, condition, language, and quantity, and push the card into the queue. Nothing is written to your account until the final submit.
The fixed preview on the right is gone: hover a print instead and a floating preview appears next to the active entry.
You can import public Archidekt deck URLs plus public Moxfield deck or binder URLs. CardSwap reads the source, turns it into import lines, and pushes those cards into the selected target list. This path is currently Magic-only.
If a public Moxfield request is blocked, you can still export the list from Moxfield and paste it manually.
Paste deck lines from Moxfield, Archidekt, or CardSwap exports directly into the text area. This is also the best fallback when a platform URL is private or rate-limited.
Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh! bulk imports now use this same pasted-list path, so you can combine pasted lines with the staged queue in one submit.
At the top of the form you choose whether the import belongs in offers or wishlist. You can append to the existing list or replace that entire list. The "Accept any edition" option is meant for wishlist entries only.
Large imports usually need shortcuts. That is why the import page lets you choose a default condition and default language for the whole submit. Explicit values on a single line always win over the default.
1 Lightning Bolt (CLB) 187 *F* [LP] [DE]
1 Sol Ring (CMM) 680
1 Counterspell (2XM) 51 [NM]In that example, the first line is foil, Lightly Played, and German. The second line inherits your chosen defaults if you set any. The third line keeps Near Mint even if the import default says something else.
Before you look for matches, also open your trade settings once. Country and shipping range now affect who can match with you.
Magic trades often break down when people mean different printings. CardSwap therefore keeps the exact print visible from import through dashboard, matching, and chat.
Whenever set code and collector number are known, CardSwap treats that exact print as the real identity of the card instead of only the name.
If any printing is fine on your wishlist, turn on this option. The matching flow may then use other sets and collector numbers of the same card instead of requiring one exact print only.
Normal, foil, and etched are stored separately. Some variants even have their own collector number, so the exact print still stays correct if the etched version is a separate listing.
CardSwap supports Near Mint, Lightly Played, Moderately Played, Heavily Played, Damaged, or not specified. Wishlist matches only become strict when a wishlist card actually requests a condition.
Language works the same way as condition. If a wishlist entry does not ask for a specific language, matching stays flexible instead of becoming needlessly strict.
Once your lists grow, the dashboard becomes the main control surface for checking whether imports look right and for finding cards quickly.
The search field is focused on card names only. That keeps it fast and predictable when you know which card you want to find.
Offers and wishlist each have their own pagination. That keeps both lists usable even when a user has hundreds or thousands of cards.
Both offers and wishlist can be exported as plain text. The dashboard also contains the tools for your public profile link if you want to share your lists outside CardSwap.
Color, type, rarity, and frame variant filters come from cached Scryfall print metadata so the dashboard can filter locally without live price lookups.
A card counts as Regular Frame when it is not tagged as extended art, borderless, showcase, or full art in the cached print metadata.
If you do not have every card in your head, the browse-offers page helps you explore. It shows which exact prints other users currently have in their offers, including preview image, cached price, and how many traders offer the same print.
You can search by card name, set, or collector, switch between multiple sort orders, and tighten the list with "shipping-compatible only" and "hide already wishlisted". One click pushes an interesting print straight into your wishlist.
Use sort orders such as cheapest, most offered, or newest and combine them with game, color, type, rarity, and variant filters to keep larger result sets under control.
The preview floats next to the active card on hover instead of blocking a permanent sidebar. You can also choose whether 2, 3, 4, or 5 cards per row should be visible.
CardSwap does not suggest random swaps. It first looks for reciprocal demand and then tries to find a reasonably balanced combination based on cached prices.
A match only starts if user A offers something user B wants and user B offers something user A wants.
If a wishlist card specifies set and collector number, CardSwap uses that exact print. But when you turn on "Accept any edition", matching may use other printings of the same card while still staying as precise as possible about language, condition, and finish.
After both sides have candidate cards, CardSwap compares grouped values and tries to stay within a reasonable tolerance so one side does not massively overpay.
The conversation is shown next to the selected trade suggestion so users can negotiate the final details without leaving the context of the match.
New incoming chat messages show up as unread badges in the navigation and on the relevant match card. Opening that trade marks those messages as read.
CardSwap now separates a raw match suggestion from the actual trade process. That keeps ratings fairer and gives users a way to report scammers even if a trade never finishes cleanly.
A match starts as a suggestion only. One trader must actively initiate the trade before the other side can accept or decline it.
The other trader can now accept or decline the exact proposed swap. This prevents drive-by ratings on trades that never really started.
If the requester changes their mind before acceptance, they can cancel the pending request and the trade returns to a normal suggestion.
After acceptance, each side marks their shipment and later confirms receipt. Once both sides confirm receipt, the trade is completed and the involved cards are removed from offers and fulfilled wishlist entries.
Completed trades can be rated once. Problem reports open after a trade was accepted, so users can still report ghosting, no shipment, wrong cards, or misstated condition before the trade ever reaches completion.
Archived matches stay readable in the Trading Center so you can review the exact cards and chat history later, even after the active workflow is finished.
Problem reports land in an admin dispute queue. That lets moderation look at the report, the match, and the user history before deciding whether the complaint should count against the account.
CardSwap includes an optional passport MRZ check for users who want an extra trust signal. A successful check adds a small badge to the profile areas where other traders can see it.
Use a clear photo or scan of the passport photo page with both MRZ lines visible. The current flow is intentionally limited to passport-style MRZ documents, not every national ID card.
CardSwap reads the visible MRZ and validates the main ICAO passport fields for the document number, birth date, and expiry date, while also recording an overall MRZ score. Expired passports are flagged separately.
The app is designed to process the uploaded image in memory for the immediate check and then discard it. It keeps only a small summary such as pass or fail status, issuing country, the last four document characters, expiry date, and an MRZ score.
The badge only means the passport-style MRZ produced a clean document-consistency result. It does not prove card ownership, document authenticity, or a full real-world identity match.
CardSwap now uses game-specific price sources. Magic comes from Scryfall first and can fall back to JustTCG when a resolved print has no USD price. Pokemon runs through TCGdex with JustTCG as a fallback. Yu-Gi-Oh! uses YGOPRODeck for search, previews, and set-based pricing, while CardTrader can cautiously enrich missing preview data.
For Magic, the app reads print metadata from Scryfall card responses and stores a USD price in the local cache. When Scryfall has no USD price for a resolved print, CardSwap can fall back to JustTCG. For Pokemon, the current live path uses TCGdex for search, exact print selection, previews, and cached pricing, with JustTCG available as a fallback. For Yu-Gi-Oh!, CardSwap uses YGOPRODeck set data for exact print selection, preview images, and cached pricing, and can enrich missing exact-print data through CardTrader when the marketplace response is still compatible with the app price model.
Caching keeps the dashboard and match views fast and avoids turning every user request into an external API request. That matters a lot once collections get larger.
Stale prices are refreshed by background jobs in controlled batches. For Magic, a scheduled MTGJSON sync now adds a broader refresh path so larger print and price updates do not depend on normal page loads.
For Magic, the refresh job can prioritize cards from the newest observed sets first, because those are often the prints users trade most actively right after release.
For players who like the technical details, here is the short architecture version of what happens under the hood.
CardSwap is a Flask app with SQLAlchemy models and Alembic migrations. The project is prepared for PostgreSQL in production and can fall back to SQLite locally.
Public deck URLs are turned into plain import lines first. That makes URL imports, pasted lists, and queued single-card entries flow through the same parser and batch processing steps.
Matching checks reciprocal demand, respects print details when available, and then compares grouped card values to avoid obviously unfair suggestions.
The interface supports German and English through Flask-Babel so core pages, import flows, and messages can stay consistent across both languages.
In production, CardSwap expects a real secret key, secure cookies, and a shared rate-limit store such as Redis instead of per-process memory limits.
The other user may not want that exact print, or the candidate trade may be too unbalanced to pass the value tolerance check.
That usually means the cache entry is still pending, stale, or the exact print could not be refreshed cleanly yet. The app can still store the card even before the price is ready.
Yes. The staged single-card queue is meant for that. Add only the prints you want and submit them into offers or wishlist without importing the whole deck.
Magic, Pokemon, and Yu-Gi-Oh! all support pasted bulk imports now. Public deck URLs are still the Magic-only path for the moment.
Start with your wishlist, then import a few easy trade offers, and only after that go to matches. It is the quickest way to see the app working end to end.
Matches are recalculated whenever your trade settings change. If you switch to domestic-only trading, older international suggestions are removed automatically.
Yes. In your trade settings you can choose selected countries and mark only the countries you actually want to ship to.
Yes. The dashboard has export buttons for both offers and wishlist so you can download your current list in plain text and reuse it elsewhere.
Yes. When Facebook login is enabled, you can use the Facebook button on login and registration. If Facebook does not provide an email address, CardSwap asks for it once and then creates or links the account directly.
This option is meant for wishlist cards where the exact set does not matter. CardSwap then looks beyond one exact print and may match other editions of the same card.
Yes. In trade settings you can enable your public profile. After that you get a shareable link for your offers and wishlist that people outside CardSwap can open as well.
CardSwap uses request throttling on login, registration, and password-reset requests, plus hidden honeypot fields on selected forms to catch simple bots without annoying normal users.
Yes, once Google sign-in is configured you can use the Google button on the login or registration page. Verified Google emails can create a new CardSwap account automatically or link to an existing account with the same email address.
The footer now includes Terms, Privacy, Legal Notice, and a dedicated Data Deletion page. Read them before real trading, especially because prices, trade suggestions, and beta features are never perfect.
The passport check flow is designed to process the uploaded image in memory for the MRZ check and then discard it. The account keeps only a small result summary and, on success, a visible trust badge.