Okay, I think we need to establish something. We are not traders, we just want shiny things. They do not need to be foil to be shinies - anything you treasure counts. Is it emoticon letters to make pretty fonts? Is it little animals to make a zoo? Who cares? Whatever you seek, do not blindly rush into purchases. Not unless you just want 6 small Steam Sale items for your showcase. Hey, if you do, I get that - not everyone has a love of glitter. Just get out of here, you offend me.

So assuming that you are not insane and do in fact love shiny things... how do we best get them?

Say we want some emoticons. Is the emoticon really expensive compared to the cards for the game? Often this is true. Then we will make a badge, level 5 and get 5 chances at the emoticons in the set.

If our badge has 5 cards per level and 5 levels then great, buy 25 cards. Hmm. The boosters are cheaper than 3 cards, sometimes cheaper than 2 cards. But who wants random stuff? So you buy boosters till the cheap ones are gone or until you have 5 of a couple of cards and then fill in the rest with single purchases. Seems legit.

This is all hope and fantasy.

When I make a badge for a game as it is cheaper than buying the emoticons, things can go wrong:

• 5x :jugofcream: to show for a level 5 Farmgirl badge (aiming for Goat/Flour).
  
• I could get 8 of one card before I get any of another from a booster.
  
• 1 card in a set could be a lot pricier than the others and what if that is not one I get?
  
• 5 spins in this lottery could send me back to the market, wishing I had just bought them.

So let us play Chess instead of Roulette.

What I would like you to do is consider a few things when looking at buying emoticons:

• Single worthy emoticon in set at a cheap price - obviously you are just buying it.
  
• If price is high or a few midrange priced items in set like letters then we need the badges
  
  
• Are the cards or the boosters cheaper? Some people go for the foils, inflating booster prices.
  
• Are the cards/boosters rare/expensive? Wishlist the game, get it on sale. Make boosters.
  
  
• Is the game withdrawn? Some people trade Non-Marketable-Cards (NMC)
  
• Is a withdrawn game premium due to rarity or emoticon letters in it? A key or gift then.
  
  
• Some items may be theoretically cheap but are so rare you will never find them.
  
• Are there a lot of emoticons in the set (some are 7-10)? You need Multiple Accounts.

Economy of Scale

1) Some emoticons or backgrounds are not as rare as their price suggests and making the badges is much more economic, especially if you are making level 5 badges on multiple accounts.

2) Usually, a booster makes more sense than buying individual cards - the Steam cut is on each item and rounds up, same as with tax in the UK. You could end up with more cards of one type but that can be helpful for trades, or you could end up with a foil card. There is no such thing as wastage.

3) With another account for more chances to make emotes from badge levels, if you are buying a pile of boosters or making them, suddenly you are not reaching a ceiling as early of 5 max.

4) Making a level 5 badge on 3 accounts gives 15 chances to hit a particular emoticon. It tends to mean you will hit 15 emoticons altogether for that card set. Ahh wait. Yes, trading. That means you have multiple copies of ones you only need x1 to trade for the missing ones. Or to sell.

5) You are not just aiming at one set of emoticons. So take letters - if you are making badge levels for 4 font sets then that means at 15 chances for each emoticon set you are generating 60 total emoticons with many spares of various letters to then trade for letters in other sets. That is a lot of potential letter choices for trading to other people and suddenly your trading power is much greater.

6) Extra trading power can translate in surprising ways - you can offer someone matching set letters for a selection of odd ones that will be of value to you. Take T, H and E from Lethis - individually they are nice but as a trade of 3 letters they are immense. The other way the extra trading power can dazzle people is simply the sheer selection they have. They might not have been attracted to a letter but now they may see a word they could make. You are not giving them fish or teaching them to fish, just taking them for a walk down by the river.

Right, if you want to clone yourself and tamper with the rules of Nature and Scientific practice, I cannot encourage this.
In fact it would be my solemn duty to advise against it.

However, if you wish to make multiple accounts on Steam then I have better news - this is quite legal by all the rules of Science, Nature and Steam, as long as you understand you will not use them to scam people. Or to have them fund human cloning. That is right out. I must be clear on that.

I joked a little there but it was to emphasise - this is absolutely fine. I have checked forums and so on myself uncertainly at first, despite having a long background in Magic Online and League of Legends where Smurf accounts were common and this is indeed legal. You may run into concerns from Steam when you link up multiple accounts to one payment source but a support ticket/chat clears that up.

If you add some cash to its wallet it becomes a full account. One of these:

This is just the same as with your main account but do not panic - you are not being forced to buy a game on an account you do not want it on. You only need to add cash to the Steam wallet and that verifies your link to a paid source, making it trusted by Steam enough to post and trade.

Suggestions for use of the secondary Steam Wallet:

1) Use the Steam funds to buy sacks of gems to make boosters for a free to play game that has a good return on boosters/foils/emoticons.

2) Straight up buy cards from that account to make badges for games with emoticons you want.

3) Buy a game on your own main account wishlist as a gift from that secondary account.

4) If a game is on sale you might just want to buy it on there or give a spare key to that account. Some games are decent enough to want to make more than 1 booster a day.

5) Simply buy items you want then trade them to your main account.

I might have belaboured the obvious but I wanted to make sure you got that you are not throwing money at something. The cash is simply routing through there for a minimum of one transaction to validate that account and still has the same spending power for you.

I would recommend if trading between accounts to use your main to initiate all trades as although you are logged in on Steam, the browser for trade can sometimes jump to your main account or the last one to use trade and you get the classic error message “you cannot trade with yourself.”



Note that once you have been friends with any account for a year the trade hold period drops to 1 day.

The Marketplace is not a shop or a stall where people barter. You scrawl a price on a wall and see what happens. I am choosing to buy or sell at the price that is on that wall.

There are no scammers on the Marketplace or nasty things that have been tried on the trade discussions. We are not those people. You are selecting an item and Steam is holding onto it for you till the transaction is resolved or cancelled. No tricks.

So feel no shame at a bargain or regret over a windfall.

Except what I said is not exactly true, there are tricks. I will not claim to have become a shadowy agent of the Gnomes of Zurich but there are some things you notice.

Pricing

If you have a rare booster you might think "it would only cost £0.30 to make one, why price it higher?" – some people are impatient enough to still pay £1 for it rather than wait a day to craft another. If a game you have is withdrawn, all bets are off regarding price. Similarly with rare items – does it hurt to give an item a week at a higher price?

Some prices may give the wrong impression about value - always consider how many have been sold recently. Having said that, it will give the same impression to most people so just because you figure it is inflated, it does not mean someone else buying will have that conclusion. If the bottom sale price for an item is £1.50, I might undercut by what seems like a good margin, at £1.20. If the item is not selling much and your price looks that much better then it is all good. If you really want a rare item though the inverse applies – it might just be better paying what is there rather than risk it going and the next step up being a lot more. And this is the nature of the dance.

Watching

A good way of keeping an eye on an item is to put a low price on buy and this is especially helpful if you are quite prepared to buy it but are waiting for a paycheck. But sometimes it is worth just being the highest of the lowballs. Often an item just appears in your inventory and you hurriedly check your Market History to find out it was a watching price or a very optimistic bid. The existing prices may look inflated to the new seller who thinks that buy price is reasonable. So while a lowball to watch is a good idea, a low to medium watch is better.

If you are watching more than 10 items then keep track of exactly how much cash is in your wallet. A fluctuation in wallet level may be your only clue that something has gone through the market.

A reasonable offer based on normal card prices may work even when you know the item has never been sold before. I have picked up items for a £2 bid when they should have been more. £2 is a good figure for a high value item – enough to draw people in, not scamming them, just inviting.

You can have up to 10 times your wallet balance on your wishlist but I would recommend having enough funds in your wallet to cover at least the 2 highest passive offers together.

The Marketplace search engine is pretty useless but the way the search works is that it looks for a set string and exactly that string unless it meets either “_” or a capital letter. For example, if you look at the Wrack emoticons and want to sift by the letters alone, you would think “Well, they are called comica, comicr, comicw and the non-letters do not have comic in the name so add search condition comic.” Nope. It will tell you no results. Now if it was called comicA or comic_a then sure it would work. It is not the same engine as used in the inventory, which would just find those letters in sequence.

Be Prepared

People have trends in what they buy, maybe as obvious as hearts, cats, foils, pieces for art, hentai but it could be just to make more badges. If you are going to trawl through a large collection, have a quick look at what they actually have on their profile or what is bought recently (non-tradable in inventory).

You can tell a lot from descriptions in the trade thread or on a profile listing trade conditions. This might indicate if someone is sensitive to being scammed, in which case an open query is best. Specific listed prices for items may seem bad as it could be a dedicated trader looking for profit but I welcome that – you get insight as to what type of things they value.

Personally, someone taking the time to look at my profile page would know I love cats, chess images, emoticon letters, things to make pictures with, cars if they face right and depending on which showcase setup I was using, maybe dragons. Many of us are pretty much an open book.

Tactics

Be fair - this will usually come across. Definitions of fair vary but you can't please everyone.

A trade post may demand 2 cards for 1 or similar but consider what you are offering. You may have a hundred of each card of a set as excess but if you are offering them a complete cycle of a card for a badge you might get a straight 1:1 offer through. The value to them is greater.

If you have met them on a trade thread for one item, is there something similar you have that might interest them? It makes sense to try to trade emoticon letters for other ones from other games if it looks like they use them but not everyone does - don't needlessly offer a good trading resource.

Sometimes people just have random stuff in their inventory that they did not particularly aim at getting. When I was making the emoticon art guide I found that some really important items to me were just valueless rubbish to other people. The old adage about trash and treasure applies. Do not always assume they really want an item just because they have it – does the other stuff they have fit with it? If not, do you have something nice but valueless to yourself?

Now in light of some of what I am saying, this will be an odd observation but it is still consistent. People may be delighted to get a big bag of junk for something they are not using. Often I will trade junk cards 2:1 or 3:1 to get specifics for hard to obtain sets. The cards of mine are random leftovers from boosters, which in turn were made as the cheapest way to make badges. Is either of us getting less value? To me the cost of those cards is Nil and the value of the target cards is high. To them the cards they give are just sitting there and without a specific trading strategy they were going nowhere. The cards I trade may have more general trading value or market resale, albeit for pennies. Nobody loses and both feel they win.

While marketplace antics are fair game and relatively anonymous, do not try to lowball people in direct trade as it poisons the encounter. Even if they think they are being lowballed or it is unintentional, offence can happen – people can be touchy and overprotective. If you really want an item just ask them about it. Some people will accept less than you would have offered and if it means nothing to them most will not attempt to scam you.

Even when you really want an item, be prepared to walk away. A reasonable and fair offer met with something ridiculous is not something you can talk your way round or counter but if you just say no thanks I can wait or will look elsewhere it will work a lot better than flaming them for being a scammer. A point of personal growth, admitting that one. You may want the item but chances are that they just want the most they can get and something is still better than nothing. Keeping my head and terminating discussions has given some good results in hopeless scenarios.

1) Do not junk items into gems. A sack of 1000 gems would have to be more than 4 times the price of a 250 gem background to equate and even then some people place value on items in trade based on how many gems they liquidate into, aside from just being wasteful.

2) Do not sell items at low prices just because you do not want them - it does not mean someone else will feel the same. When you are in the trade window, prices do not show and someone may like its look. If you think an item will sell for a large price and then let you buy stuff you need then great but every little item is potentially a trade.

3) Be patient. Missing out on an item because you wouldnt pay the price is annoying sure but is it as bad as missing out on items because you used up all your wallet cash? Or letting the impact of spending online roll into your mainstream finances?

4) Don't keep masses of identical stock on your main account. If you have been making boosters over and over and do not clear out some of the excess cards, think how it looks to someone browsing your inventory for trade. There are no folders to store stuff so it is equivalent to a high street store having trash stacked next to the perfume counter.

5) In some rare cases the foil cards are not much more than the regular ones. Another badge level to aim for per account means 20% extra chances. A slight increase in costs is probably worth it.

6) You may have a massive amount of one card from an excess set and few of another. You may not need those cards for yourself but if you trade (usually at a slight loss) the glut for the deficit one, you will have a much more attractive thing to trade: complete levels. Take a loss to get a win.

7) People value items and cards in trade more than they would cash. Magnify that if you have a complete set for a badge level or if the game is withdrawn. Some people want NMC (non-marketable cards) but some want items with value that they can sell to get cash back for NMC that they have. My advice with excess items is to keep them for trade unless the price you would get for them is high.

8) Value vs usage: Letters are worth a lot more than other items - you will use them over and over. Art items are worth more than most of the remaining ones as they open up possibilities. Icons you will only use in chat once a month are worthless. But not everyone sees that. I would put a massive value on the characters ":)" over the years but ":wnhappy:"? So remember that while :lmao: is cool looking at first impression, and non-marketable so harder to get, the only real value it has is in trade.

9) If you are going to make boosters for a free to play game you just need the license. Click play on the store page then cancel the download. Check "Account details" from top right of Steam client and there is a section that will now show a complimentary license. A license to print money.

10) Make a list of the trophy items you are struggling to get and move on. You will come across them almost always later on. People keep nonmarketable items in the back of their inventories and think nothing of them. Patience may be a virtue but it is also profitable.


This illustrates point 5 above about the foil card prices, one is actually cheaper than regular, apart from what it shows about the low booster price compared to the cards. Given that, especially for UK tax laws, 3 items would incur greater cost than 1 with Steam cut, this can be significant.

Use the browser version of Steam for Market previewing - since it is browser-based you can zoom in by holding control and moving the mousewheel. Stops you buying turkeys when it isn't Xmas.

This was never intended to be some complete guide to making money on Steam or learning to work the markets like a pro. This is basically an appendix to some other guides I made that each necessitate a lot of trading to acquire emoticons or other items and it felt irresponsible and wasteful not to share a few things I picked up on the way to making those guides.

Although the point of this guide was simply to reduce costs and make targets more accessible, one chain of actions to try to make a profit is to:

• Identify games that are cashcows and wishlist them
  
• Either buy them on sales or trade for the keys on Barter
  
• Try to buy gems during sales as prices crash then by a large %
  
• Make badges across your accounts using gems
  
• Sell the emotes and backgrounds.

I could tell you the games I have found that are cashcows but where is the fun in that?

If you feel you can add better insight, I welcome it and will list sources of good suggestions.

If you have found this then it is likely because I have directed you here from the main guides. If you have stumbled in here randomly then I hope this has been some help but I am probably not the best person to answer follow-up questions on trading. What I understand about the Market and Trade Discussions developed as I sought out items and if that journey can be abbreviated for you, then great.

I wanted a background that was cartoony and while Cuphead was ok, there is not much else good. Had exhausted searches so I sorted Marketplace backgrounds by most expensive. Found a nice one at over $1000. The badge was able to be made since the cards are still marketable. And level 5 gave the ReallyRaspberry background at last. The point is that prices people pick can be simply for lolz.

And over to you...