Trade Feature Guide

Delivery vs. trade: the difference at a glance

CardWish has two ways of getting a diamond card into your account, and newcomers often mix them up — so let’s draw the line first:

• Delivery: uses the game’s gifting feature. You give up nothing — accept the friend request, collect the card, done. One per Player ID per game day.
• Trade: uses the game’s trade feature. Per the game’s rules, you put up a card of the same rarity in exchange (a ◆4 for a ◆4, a ◆1 for a ◆1). Each Player ID also gets one free trade per game day.

The two allowances are counted separately, and both reset at 14:00 Taiwan time. In other words, each day you can receive one card for free (delivery) and turn a duplicate into one more card you actually want (trade) — how you combine them is up to you.

When should you use a trade?

A trade costs you a same-rarity card, so at first glance delivery always looks better — but trading has a niche of its own:

• Today’s delivery allowance is spent and you suddenly need a second diamond card — trade is your extra lane.
• Clearing duplicates: turn the spare ◆3s and ◆4s piling up from pack openings into the same-rarity cards you are missing — effectively converting “dead” cards into the exact card you want.
• Delivery shortages at peak hours: at busy times, the delivery accounts’ daily gifting quotas can run dry. Trade rides a different mechanism and sometimes gets through faster.

Star and Shiny cards go through a separate points redemption system — see the points and redemption guide.

The trade flow, start to finish

Step 1: On the claim page, pick your card, choose “Trade” as the claim method, enter your 16-digit Player ID, and submit.

Step 2: The delivery account sends a friend request to your ID. In the game, open Social Hub → Friends → the Approve tab on the far right, check the account name shown on the claim page, and accept.

Step 3: Once you are friends, the account initiates a trade invitation. Open the trade screen and you will see it offering the card you selected.

Step 4: Pick a same-rarity card from your collection to give in return, and confirm. The trade completes within seconds and the card lands straight in your collection.

You can follow the whole process on the claim page (just enter your Player ID): queued, invitation sent, completed, or the failure reason.

Common reasons a trade fails

• The friend request was not accepted: the most common cause. Invitations expire if left too long — open the Approve tab soon after submitting.
• No same-rarity card to give: a hard rule of the game; without a matching card, the trade cannot complete. Keep a few duplicates on hand as trade fodder.
• In-game trade limits or costs: the game itself may cap trade counts or charge resources; go by the current in-game notice.
• The language version is out of stock: switch languages or try another day — stock refreshes every five minutes; see the Card Dex guide.
• Today’s trade allowance is already used: one per Player ID per game day; come back after the 14:00 reset.

Failed requests state the reason in the status panel — match it against the list above. If the allowance was not actually consumed, most failures can simply be retried the next day.

Trade safety notes

Every CardWish trade goes through the game’s official built-in trade interface, exactly like an everyday trade between friends: you see both sides’ cards on the confirmation screen, and nothing happens unless you agree. CardWish will never ask for your account password, and will never ask for extra cards beyond the trade itself — any message claiming to be CardWish and demanding cards up front or your credentials is a scam.

Ready? Head to the claim page and try a trade, or review the complete claim guide first.

The real cost of a trade has two layers

Above we said a trade costs you “a card of the same rarity”. That is only the first layer. In practice the price of a trade is two costs stacked on top of each other:

• Layer one: a same-rarity card. A ◆4 for a ◆4, a ◆1 for a ◆1. This is a hard rule of the game — without a matching card in your collection, the trade simply cannot happen.
• Layer two: the in-game trade material (players usually just call it “sand”). The higher the rarity, the more of it a single trade consumes — and it accumulates far more slowly than duplicate cards do.

Layer two is where most people actually get stuck. “I have spare ◆4s sitting right there, but I don’t have enough sand to trade them” is an extremely common situation: layer one has a solution, layer two often does not.

So a simple rule of thumb: at low rarities (◆1, ◆2) the sand cost is light and trading is excellent value; from ◆3 upwards the sand starts to bite, and delivery — which costs no sand at all — is usually the more practical route.

What do players actually pick? The real distribution

This is not guesswork. Below are CardWish’s completed claim records — 98,958 claims from 4,735 players, up to 2026-09-04 — split into delivery and trade by rarity:

The curve is unmistakable: over 70% of ◆1 and ◆2 claims go through trade, that drops to 28% at ◆3, and at ◆4 only 9% remain. This decline lines up exactly with the second cost layer above — the higher the rarity, the tighter the sand budget, and the more players switch to delivery on their own.

Star and Shiny cards show no delivery figures here because they do not use the gifting mechanism at all: they are always completed as trades via points redemption (see the points and redemption guide). For the full breakdown, read our delivery vs. trade data analysis.