Start with $100. Finish with all 250 Sprytes. A card-collecting economy game for iPhone and iPad, built in SwiftUI.
Trading Up is built around the best part of trading cards: tearing open a fresh pack and turning it over one card at a time.
Buy a pack, rip it, and find out what you got. Six cards — three commons, two uncommons, and a rare or an ultra rare — with a 1% shot at a shimmering foil on any of them. New pulls go straight into your binder. Extras can become cash, fulfil a collector’s request, or help you trade for the Spryte you’re missing.
Between those two ends is a real economy — pack odds, a buylist spread, collector deals, grading variance and set bonuses — that you can actually play against instead of just watching. Collect all 250 Sprytes and you’re a Master Collector. Run out of cash with no sale, grade, or collector deal left to help and you’re tapped out.
Every creature, name, illustration and line of flavor text is original to the game, generated from code and shipped inside the app. No accounts, no ads, no tracking. Set 1 is free to play in full; one optional one-time purchase unlocks the other four sets.
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Shop
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Rip packs
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Keep or sell
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Grade
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Collect
How to play
🛒 Buy a pack
Each of the five sets sells a Pack of 6 cards. Higher sets cost steeply more — $10 → $30 → $75 → $160 → $400 — but hold far more valuable cards, so working your way up is the only route to the expensive half of the collection.
✨ Rip it
Tap to reveal cards one at a time, with the hit slot always saved for last. Every pack is 3 commons, 2 uncommons, and 1 rare-or-ultra, and every card has a 1% chance to be a shiny foil (×3 value).
🗂️ Keep or sell
On the pack summary, brand-new cards are flagged ✦ NEW. Tap any duplicate to keep or sell it individually, or use Sell Duplicates / Keep All at the bottom — the sell total updates live as you decide each card.
The shop buys at a buylist spread: you get 60% of a card’s market value. Churning packs and dumping dupes slowly bleeds money, and that spread is the game’s main risk. You can never sell your last copy of a card, so your collection is always safe.
🤝 Meet the collectors
Matthew pays for starter collections, Emilie wants evolution-family cards, and Jonny trades for a missing Spryte you choose. You have two trades per set, so each target matters.
Choose a set’s pack in Collectors to see its offers. Keep useful extras for an exchange, or turn them into cash. Deals use only ordinary, ungraded extras, never your best copy, a foil, or a graded card. Review exactly what you give and get before confirming. Offers never expire, work offline, and never consume your permanent Binder.
🏅 Grade your best
Send any card to grading for a flat per-set fee ($2–$10) and roll a PSA grade. A PSA 10 is ×5, a PSA 9 is ×2, and a PSA 1 is a freak ×10 jackpot — but grades 2–7 are worth less than ungraded. Because the fee is cheap next to a pricey card, grading valuable duplicates before you sell them is a real edge. Grading and foils stack.
📖 Complete the binder
Browse all 50 cards per set. Owned cards show off your best copy; unowned cards are locked silhouettes. Filter the grid by Dupes, Foils and Rare+, and combine filters to narrow further. Completing an evolution line pays a cash bonus; completing a whole set pays a big one (15× the pack price).
🏆 Win or go broke
Win by collecting all 250 cards. Lose if your cash drops below $10 — the cheapest pack — with no way to raise it and no collector deal left to complete. Winning is a celebration, not an ending: dismiss the win screen and your completed collection stays yours to browse. Starting over is always an explicit, confirmed choice.
Your progress auto-saves after every action, and a save is never silently discarded.
Five sets, 250 cards
| # | Set | Theme | Pack price |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Emberfall | Fire / magma | $10 |
| 2 | Tidecaller | Water / ice | $30 |
| 3 | Verdspire | Grass / nature | $75 |
| 4 | Voltcrest | Electric / storm | $160 |
| 5 | Umbral Reach | Shadow / cosmic | $400 |
Each set is 50 cards with its own creatures, evolution lines, flavor text and rarity spread, and unlocks as your collection grows.
No catches
- Set 1 is free to play in full. The whole 50-card loop — rip, sell, grade and the set bonus. One optional one-time purchase unlocks the other four sets and the 250-card finish, and that is the only thing you can ever buy.
- No ads, no tracking, no subscriptions.
- No real-money packs and no gambling. You never spend real money on a random pull — the only currency inside the game is fictional.
- No data collected. Your collection lives in a single file on your device and is never sent anywhere.
- Plays offline, on both iPhone and iPad — a connection is only needed once to make or restore the purchase.