Gift vs Trade: Two Completely Different Rankings

The question this answers

There are two ways to get a card here. A gift is free — someone simply sends you the card and you give nothing back. A trade requires you to hand over a card of the same rarity to receive one — and from ◇3 upwards it also costs the in-game trade currency players call “sand”. Same players, same site, same period — and yet the two rankings look nothing alike. The gift top ten is almost entirely ◇4 ex cards; the trade top ten is almost entirely ◇2 trainer cards.

The intuitive reading goes like this: the cards people are willing to pay for are the ones they truly want. So the trade ranking should surface the rarer, more coveted cards.

The data says the exact opposite — and why it says the opposite is what this article is really about.

• Gifts completed166,507
• Trades completed92,407
• Data through2026-10-12

Both figures count only requests that were actually delivered (failed and expired requests are excluded). Every table on this page is generated directly from those records and refreshes automatically, drawing on the same source as the homepage counter and the most-claimed ranking — the numbers never disagree with each other.

Ranking one: gifts (free, but once per day)

The last column is where the same card sits in the trade ranking, so you can read the gap between the two lists directly.

Ranking two: trades (costs a card of the same rarity)

The number one trade card typically sits somewhere past rank seventy on the gift list. The number one gift card does make the trade top ten, but at roughly a quarter of its gift share.

The rarity mix is almost a mirror image

Break every request down by rarity and the contrast is even sharper than the rankings themselves:

Gifts concentrate on ◇4, trades concentrate on ◇2 — the two are essentially swapped. One number puts it even more bluntly: trainer cards (items, stadiums and supporters — everything that is not a Pokémon) make up 6.65% of gifts and 34.89% of trades.

The same people, on two different channels, are not asking for the same kind of card at all.

Why? It is the cost structure, not preference

Lay the two rulebooks side by side and the answer is straightforward.

Gifts: free, but one per Player ID per game day (resets at 14:00 UTC+8). One shot a day, and it costs you nothing — so the rational move is to spend it on the most expensive card, the one that is hardest to pull from packs. That makes the gift ranking a vote on the question "if you could have exactly one card for free today, which would it be?" — and ◇4 ex cards dominate the answer.

Trades: no daily cap, but you must hand over a card of the same rarity — and from ◇3 upwards, burn “sand” as well. To receive a ◇4 ex you must give up a ◇4 ex of your own and have saved enough sand, which is hard to come by — that is the real gate on high-rarity trading. ◇1 and ◇2 trades, by contrast, cost no sand at all, and giving away a spare costs you nothing you will miss.

So the gate on trading is not how badly you want it — it is what you can afford to give up. What players can afford are the ◇1 and ◇2 cards that pile up as duplicates from packs and cost no sand, which is why trade volume collapses onto the low rarities. It also explains the fivefold gap in trainer cards: items and stadiums are mostly ◇2, landing squarely in the affordable band.

The "willing to pay" index

For each card, divide its share of trades by its share of gifts. Above 1 means relatively more people were willing to give a card up to get it; below 1 means it moves almost entirely through the free channel. To keep small samples from manufacturing false signals, only cards with at least 50 requests on both channels are listed.

Highest index

Lowest index

The top of the list is uniformly ◇2 items and stadiums; the bottom is uniformly ◇4 ex cards. That line quantifies the previous section: the index does not measure desire, it measures the difference in acquisition cost.

So what does each ranking actually answer?

This is the practical payoff. The two lists are not two versions of one thing — they answer two different questions.

The gift ranking is a wish list. It answers "if everyone could have one card free today, what would they take?" It faithfully tracks the format's headline ex cards and reacts fastest to a new set's novelty rush. If you want to know who the protagonists of the current format are, read this one.

The trade ranking is a deck-gap list. It answers "where are the people actually building decks getting stuck?" Anyone who spends a trade on a ◇2 item card usually has the decklist written already and is short one or two pieces that keep it from running. Nobody pays attention to those cards while opening packs — but without them the whole deck stalls.

Put simply: the gift ranking tells you who the format's stars are; the trade ranking tells you where decks are actually stuck. The second is information no tier list can give you — no hand-picked ranking will ever put a ◇2 item card in its top three, but real demand data does.

How to use the two rankings

If you are chasing the format: read the gift top ten. Those are the headline ex cards most people are trying to fill in right now. Spend your daily free claim there, because that is the slot packs are worst at filling.

If your deck is stuck: read the trade ranking, and pay special attention to cards that rank low on gifts but break into the trade top ten. Those are the pieces everybody is missing but nobody will waste a free claim on. Your deck is probably short the same card.

If you are planning resources: cross-reference. Cards high on both lists are genuinely in demand. Cards that only appear on the trade list are usually cheap to replace — handle those through trading and save your daily claim.

New to the process? Start with the full claim walkthrough. For the rules and troubleshooting behind the two channels, see the trade guide. For rarity tiers and how each one can be obtained, see the rarity breakdown.

What this data cannot tell you

A few limits, stated plainly so the numbers are not misread:

1. The high rarities in the trade ranking are not free-market trades. The ★2 and SAR entries come from this site's points redemption. Those are delivered through the trade channel, but their cost structure is completely different — they are not evidence that anyone traded a ★2 for a ★2.

2. The gift channel opened earlier than trading. The two totals do not cover exactly the same span; the gift side includes a few extra weeks. This barely affects the rarity mix or the rankings — we checked against the overlapping period and the conclusions hold — but keep it in mind when comparing individual card counts precisely.

3. New sets reshuffle the board. In the first week or two after a set launches, the gift ranking fills up with that set's ex cards. That is a novelty rush, not steady-state demand. Check back a couple of weeks later for a truer picture.

4. A few cards repeat for special reasons. Occasionally a low-rarity card shows a very high trade count from a very small number of players. That usually means a secret mission requires collecting many copies of that one card, and a handful of players are farming it. It is not broad demand — watch for that "high count, few players" combination.

5. This is our players' behaviour, not everyone's. People who use this site already skew toward actively hunting for missing cards. The sample has a bias and does not represent the official competitive meta or players worldwide.

This page updates itself

Every table here is generated straight from real claim records and keeps updating as gifts and trades come in — it is not a frozen snapshot. Come back after the next set launches and you will see the gift ranking flooded with new ex cards first, while the trade ranking's utility pieces turn over more slowly. That lag is a genuinely interesting signal in itself.