Icon Flipping Guide

What is Icon Flipping?

Icon Flipping is a specific Special Card Flipping technique focused on Icon Cards. This guide will cover the differences compared to Special Card Flipping and the unique points of Icon Flipping. I recommended reading the Special Card Flipping Guide for more specific details. 

Icons are effective to trade with because of their rarity. They are the rarest and most in-demand meta cards all year long. This is the reason you can see better fluctuations and they hold their prices better. 

Key Differences

The 59th-minute Technique

This is a special Technique used for Icon Flipping. 

The idea of the 59th-minute technique is to get to the first page of newly listed cards, that’s the place where most deals can be found! You click the next page until you reach the page that has all the 59-minute listings. 

The 59th-minute technique is so popular because it shows all icons on the market with one single filter instead of searching for them one by one. This allows you to cover more of the market, very similar to sniping filters but without the sniping. 

To make this the most efficient, you need to get to the 59th minute as fast as possible! In general, you can say that the Web app is faster than the Companion app and that the Console is the slowest out of all three options.

The console is the worst by far because of the menu lag and the way that Icons are displayed individually. That means you have to select each Icon before seeing the price.

Webapp is the best option. You have more listings per page which allows you to scroll faster and it shows every Icon price below each other.  

Market View

Another difference between Special Card Flipping is the market view.

As mentioned, the Icon filter is already reducing the market from thousands of cards to just about 100 Icons but that is still a lot. Setting additional filters such as a price range, a nation or a position can help to find deals faster and your search results are filtered even more. 

Most commonly this is used to find cards in your price range. There is no point in searching for cards outside of your budget as they just take up space on the transfer market and you are losing valuable minutes by searching at a wrong price range. 

Icon Filters

Under 500k Filter

This is a very beginner filter but also a very fundamental one. 

Icons below 500k usually sell faster and they provide a solid ROI. That makes this filter easy to use and fast to learn. On top of that, the risk is relevantly low as most of these cards stay around the same prices. 

Basic Chemistry Style

That’s very effective during supply times such as promo weekends with Lightning Rounds. Newly packed cards always have the Basic Chemistry Style and using this filter shows you more new cards on the market than any other search. This also makes sniping easier and helps to find bigger undercuts. On top of that, fresh icons sell for a little bit more because some people like clean records on the cards.

Position Filter - Defender/Midfielder/Attacker

That’s one of the main filters to get to the 59th minute faster. This allows you to pinpoint the Icons much better and you can find deals easier.

It's very straightforward, you reduce the results by a lot and you know what to look for. Adding a price filter makes this even stronger. 

59th Min Sniping Filter

A filter many Icon traders know about but don’t like to talk about. You set your max. bid at 150k-180k and the min. bin at 300-350k. This filter allows you to find more crazy deals. People with less trading knowledge like to list cards for min. bid and then a massive undercut on the bin. This filter shows exactly these types of listings. 

This filter should show you only 2-3 pages until the 59th minute and that can make a huge difference for your Icon Trading. It doesn’t show all Icons, it only shows Icons that get listed at min. bid price, that’s why this is also called the Panic Filter or Bin Price Filter.

Throughout the last years, this got very popular for sniping and that’s why it's called Sniping Filter nowadays. It’s a very competitive filter and I only recommend this if you are a fast sniper. You don’t have much time to check the prices or analyse the market using this filter, you have to be ready and know the market before buying a card. 

Last notes

Patience

Icon flipping is not an easy thing to master and you have to be prepared to take some Ls in the learning process. This counts for almost every trading method but Icon Trading is one of the tougher ones especially if you have little or no experience with flipping in general. You will face situations when the Icon Market just isn’t doing what you want and you have to learn to wait for the recovery or take the loss to get other trades going.

List high for Overnights

Due to Icons being so rare, overnight sales can get high! List them for your aimed sell price for 6h/12h and you might get lucky and hit a nice overnight high.

New Promo Icons

This is a new addition to the Icon market last year and it changed the Icon market a lot. EA will release new Icon versions through promos throughout the year. 

This can dramatically decrease the value of your Icons if your Icon is featured in one of the promo squads. Holding Icons into Friday is a risk and you can avoid the risk if you sell earlier. Leaks have a similar effect on Icons and are another risk to this trading method. 

Promo Icons during the promo behave almost identically to other promo cards and we recommend avoiding them for any Icon Trading until they are out of packs. The Out-of-Pack trends for Promo Icons are very similar to other Special Cards, Icon Trading with out-of-pack Icons is still possible. 

Summary

- It's very similar to Special Card Flipping

- Filter the market to reduce the search results

- Apply techniques and methods from previous guides