DIGITAL DABBLINGS #3 – Trading ABCs: Some basics on how to post your Topp WWE Slam cards for trade

By far the best aspect of Topps WWE Slam is the ability to trade digital cards from one player to another. While the trading function is actually easy to use it can take some time to actually master what is and isn’t a good trade, and how to get the most out of the feature. Many new players have no idea what is or isn’t a good trade, and thus without even knowing it will get themselves a low rating just by offering bad trades to veteran players. Today I’d like to show you a few ways for you to avoid those pitfalls.

First, let’s give the basics, how to post your cards for trade, and how to accept offers. There’s two ways to find traders, one is by using the Fan Feed/Information Article Comments, and the other is by using the Blind Trade feature. I’m not a big fan of the Blind Trade and I find that it’s only really useful for those high-end low CC cards, so I’m going to table that discussion for another time. As far as the Fan Feed goes, There’s two main ways within the app to let people know about your cards for trade. One is the Fan Feed, located on the main page. [Graphic1] 

This is a fairly quick moving chat room where virtually everyone in the game will go at one point or another. You can also find the Fan Feed button on the bottom of the main screen by scrolling down. [Graphic2] It may take some time getting used to the abbreviations used by other players here’s a few:

• FT – For Trade,
• LF – Looking For
• NFT – Not For Trade
• OE – Open Edition  
• MOTM – Masters on the Mic (Monday’s Marathon)
• QOTR – Queen of the RIng (Tuesday’s Marathon)
• RR – Royal Rumble
• SS – Survior Series (or older Summerslam)

Here’s what the Fan Feed looks like and an example of an average post. [Graphic 3] You can see this player is looking to trade his Pay Per View duplicates for Royal Rumble cards of Fandango, Bayley, Kofi Kingston, John Cena and Nikki Bella or Takeover San Antonio cards of Shinsuke Nakamura. Scroll down and you’ll see thousands of posts. You can even search the feed for keywords. Players have to be concise when posting on the fan feed due to the character limit on the feed. Also there’s a quite stringent community guidelines one must adhere to, no swearing, no bullying, no advertising outside sales, etc. You can find the guidelines in the help section of the app. You don’t want to violate these rules because it could mean that you might get restricted access to the Fan Feed and not be able to trade.

The same guidelines apply to the Information Article comments, which are another way to post your wants/haves or post comments on the individual cards. I often find if I’m looking for a specific set or specific card within a set, posting on the appropriate information article comments section just like the posts on the Fan Feed, works rather well. For example if you need that day’s Marathon you’d post a request for it on the corresponding information article comments.

If you would like to make a trade with this player all you have to do is click their username (blacked out above) on their fan feed posts and it brings up a sub-menu that has “offer trade” as an option. Click on it and choose cards you want, and cards you’ll give up and send the trade. It’s that simple right? Well, not so much.  

As I said above a lot of players make bad offers to begin with because they have no idea what individual cards are worth. Let’s take a look at three different offers I received just this afternoon. First here’s my own current Fan Feed posting.  [Graphic 4]  You can see my name at top, my trader rating which is almost at 4½ stars, how many ratings I’ve gotten (the 1084 in the parenthesis) and my fan score (85.99571) which is how Topps lets you know about how well you’re doing in the game. Top players will have a score of 80 or higher.     FYI I use the Notes app on my Macbook and iPhone to compose these fanfeed posts and that way I can just copy and paste them, and also use special characters like the color balls to differentiate different tiers of cards.

Now then at the top of my post you can see I’m looking for Royal Rumble Blue Base cards, Champions Variants, the In-App Royal Rumble cards and NXT Silver cards. I have for trade Pay Per View and Marathon Duplicates and singles of Topps Now, Colossi, Villains Bounties 50K Miz and 100K Samoa Joe, Blizzard, Galaxy and so on. In easier terms, I’m willing to trade only my dupes for Pay Per Views and Marathons and then singles of any of those listed sets. Implied is that I don’t want to trade anything else, but that implication falls on many deaf ears as you’ll see. Sometimes if I have room I’ll put something like “ONLY these cards for trade”, “not trading anything else” or “Not breaking sets”. It does little good though to stop bad offers, they still come in.  

So let’s look at the offers I’ve received just now.  [Graphic 5]  On the surface this looks like a decent offer, his In-App Royal Rumble Stone Cold Steve Austin for my Nicknames Triple H. But diving deeper, while I do need the Austin card, I’m not trading the Triple H flat out. It happens to be part of the complete set, and the award hadn’t been issued yet. Secondly I actually purchased that card off of eBay because I wanted the set as the award is Finn Balor, one of my two “MUST HAVE” performers in the game (the other is Bret Hart). So unless I get a deal that is ridiculously in my favor, I’m not trading him, since I’d have to reacquire one anyone.  

A quick check of ebay tells me I can pay the same price for another copy, and I have been known to do this upon occasion, but again the trade has to be worth it, and this one is not. First thing to do is to check the CC or card count on the back of the card. Here’s the back of the Stone Cold.  [Graphic 6] See that 875 it means there are only 875 of these in the entire game. Actually a fairly low number. Now here’s the back of the Triple H card.  [Graphic 7] There’s only 292 of him in the game. That’s almost 1/3rd of the number of the Austin! So right there I know it’s not a good deal.

I can also look up the odds of pulling each card from a pack and how much those packs cost. I know that the Royal Rumble was either 1 in 4 in a 2,500 coin pack (though they were only available for a short period of time on Sunday during the IN-App Royal Rumble) or guaranteed in a pack for 7,500 coins. The Nicknames cards were 1:40 odds in a 10,000 coin pack if I recall correctly, so the average cost of one Nicknames is 400,000 coins. Versus 7,500 or 10,000 average cost for the Rumble cards? That’s a huge difference.  

Finally if I were really unsure I might check the relative eBay values of each side of the deal. Now I already know the Triple H replacement cost is $3.50. The cheapest replacement for the Austin card is only $1.00. This is a bad deal for me and I’m declining. Now I do have the option of countering the trade to add something from his side that might make up the difference, but as I said, the Triple H isn’t for trade as it is, so I’m not going to bother.  

Let’s take a look at another trade which won’t really require as much analysis. Check this one out, [Graphic 8] he’s offering me:

1. Red HOF Randy Savage
2. Best of Slam Color Vintage Jake Roberts, a
3. Record Breaker Triple H
4. White Flight Kevin Owens
5. Red Rumble Base Jey Uso

For My:

1. Award Dual Signature of Brock Lesnar and Goldberg,
2. White Triple Signature of Dean Ambrose, AJ Styles and John Cena.  

This is a really terrible offer. First of all I would virtually never trade away those cards, and secondly are worth a lot more on the secondary market. Together they add up to about $15 or more if I were to try to replace them. He offered me cards that aren’t even worth a total of $5. So this is basically an insult as far as I see it. He’s might be trying to scam me out of great cards thinking I don’t know any better. This is sadly only one of many of these offers that I get each and every day. This player isn’t new, he’s got 326 ratings and only a 3 and a half star rating. This tells me that he usually makes bad offers. Not only that, that White Flight Kevin Owens card is one of the single worst inserts in the game, and it’s an open edition card. I’ve touched on these in the past and I’ve got a more detailed write-up on why the open edition cards are virtually worthless on Reddit (https://redd.it/5f3i9q). ANY trade that I see that has that card in it is an automatic decline on my part. I don’t want it, and if I did I would already have it. I wrote this trader back “You offered me less than $5 for two cards that sell for over $15 and are NFT anyway. Plus no one wants White Flight KO.  #open=autodecline.  1-star.”  That hashtag is something I’m trying to get popularized.  

So now that I’ve shown two bad trades, what’s a good one you might ask. Well simply put a good trade is where you get what you want and you give away something you don’t want or need. My last accepted trade was a duplicate NXT Takeover San Antonio Tan base for a Royal Rumble Red Base of Finn Balor.

Another recent trade I accepted was a player offered me a Red Stars of the 1990s Alundra Blayze for my Duplicate 10,000 Coin Villain Bounty Ric Flair duplicate. Now I don’t collect the Stars of the 90’s, but the Flair doesn’t do me any good as I have completed the collection, and since it’s an open edition it’s really not worth much. The Alundra card I can use as trade bait for other marathons in the future.  

I also recently accepted a trade where I gave up my only NXT Takeover SA Silver Billie Kay and in return I got a Royal Rumble Blue Base American Alpha and NXT Silvers of Shinsuke Nakamura, Tommaso Ciampa and Rezar. Now I didn’t offer that trade it was offered to me, but I’d be stupid to not accept a trade where I get three extra of the same tier cards for one of mine, single or not, and since I had not completed the set, it didn’t hurt me. As I’ve said all along the Female performers will outshine the Males in popularity and value in every facet of the game.

So tips to remember on how to make a good offer are:  

1. Make both sides as even as possible in both value and card count, or even offer your trade partner a better deal than you’re getting.  
2. Make sure they NEED the card too. In the sorting functions of the Trade Screen there’s an option to choose to show only cards that they need, I highly suggest using this feature. There’s nothing worse than being offered cards you already have for your cards that you actually need.
3. Make sure you actually read people’s fan feed posts and don’t offer them stuff they aren’t looking for, or specifically won’t trade. Try not to offer for people’s singles unless they specifically say they’re trading them.
4. Use the comment feature if you’re not sure about the trade value. If you’re new say “I’m new, just trying to make a good trade” or something similar. You can always say “please counter” and see if they will do so.  
5. Start off slowly, don’t start looking for signature cards or low cc inserts right away without having something similar in return. Don’t offer any base cards for inserts, that’s a sure way to get low rated.  
6. If you’re brand new to the game you can say in the fan feed “Brand new, offering base dupes for base I need” and you’ll probably even get a few free base cards from players who like to help. I know that I will often give away 9 white, green or even teal cards to newer players just because I have so many. Don’t go begging for free cards though, it’s uncouth and will turn people off.  
7. Try to stay away from Open Edition cards and definitely don’t offer Open Edition cards for Limited Edition cards (i.e. cards with a “sold out” notice on them), unless someone has specifically said that’s what they want.
8. If you have questions about a card value, ask someone. Post a comment on this column, or there’s plenty of Facebook groups on this game (I’m in four of them), and in our Reddit we have a specific thread just to ask about card values and whether or not a trade is good.  (https://redd.it/56qb0j).  
9. Even if you have no intentions of ever buying or selling on ebay, you can check out current and sold listings for cards and that will give you a good idea of values.  
10. Remember it’s just a game, and don’t let a bad offer or a declined offer g et to you. DEFINITELY do not lash out and use swear words or call the other person names. That will get you banned for a day or two and isn’t great.  

Happy Trading, oh and if you’ve read this far and you’re new (i.e. under 50 trader ratings) find me in game [remember I’m Grendelsen] and I’ll give you any 9 regular base White, Green or Teal dupes (no hoards, no sold outs, no expansion base (Goldberg, TJ Perkins, Bobby Roode, Brian Kendrick and NO SINGLES, don’t ask for 9 teals). Just make sure you comment that you read my article.   

NOW CHECK OUT LAST WEEK’S ARTICLE: DIGITAL DABBLINGS #2 – Topps WWE Slam Cards – The Effect of NXT Takeover San Antonio Results and the Royal Rumble