The position
Cards cannot be bought. There is no currency in Magpeye and no card is ever sold, individually or in a pack.
Cards cannot be sold. They have no monetary value, cannot be cashed out, and cannot be exchanged for anything outside the app.
There are no random packs. Every card is earned by doing a specific thing in a specific window, listed before you start.
Trades are between two people who have added each other. Nothing is auctioned, listed or offered to strangers.
Species cards are never tradable. They are a record of what you saw, and a record that can change hands is not a record.
The rest of this document is those five, expanded.
Cards cannot be bought
There is no currency in Magpeye. No coins, no gems, no credits, no premium currency under any name. There is nothing to top up and no screen anywhere in the app that takes a payment for a card.
Nothing is sold individually and nothing is sold in a pack, because there are no packs. Premium exists, but premium buys the map’s memory — the history, the date range, the walk routes, the distribution layer — and nothing else. A premium account gets no cards, no extra cards, no rarer cards and no better odds at anything, because there are no odds at anything.
Rarity in Magpeye is computed from where you are standing and what month it is. Money cannot move you.
Cards cannot be sold
A card has no monetary value. It is not money, not a security, not a token and not property with a price.
There is no cash-out. There is no exchange rate to anything. There is no way to convert a card into a payment, a voucher, a subscription or another card at a rate. There is no marketplace, no listing, no auction, no bidding and no price anywhere in the app, and there is no third party that Magpeye recognises as a place cards may be traded.
Selling cards outside the app is grounds for termination. Buying them, selling them, advertising them, or trading them for money or for anything else of value — on another site, in a forum, in a messaging app, anywhere — will get both accounts removed. So will selling or buying a Magpeye account.
If Magpeye shuts down, cards do not become anything. There is nothing to redeem and never was.
There are no random packs
Every card in Magpeye is earned by doing something specific, in a stated window, and the requirement is written down before you start.
An event card says what it wants: log at least one bird during the window, or log a stated number of distinct species, or add a stated number of species you did not already have. You either did it or you did not. There is no draw, no roll and no chance element at any point.
This is the part that keeps Magpeye clearly out of the territory regulators are interested in. A random draw for items of differing scarcity, paid for with money, is the shape that gets called gambling. Magpeye has no draw and no payment, so the question does not arise.
Some event cards have a finite edition and carry a serial number. That is a keepsake, not a value. There is no secondary market for it because there is no market at all.
Trades are between two people who have added each other
You can only trade with a confirmed friend. Not somebody in a group with you, not somebody in your party, not somebody whose handle you looked up. Both people have to have accepted each other first.
Nothing is auctioned. Nothing is listed. There is no board of open offers and no way to offer anything to a stranger, because there is no surface in the app on which a stranger could see it.
A trade has no free-text message on it — only one of a fixed set of preset lines. Free text on an offer to somebody who has not replied yet is the unsolicited-contact problem in its purest form, and there is no safe default version of it, so it does not exist.
Trades expire if nobody answers. Either side can cancel or decline, and either side can report the trade with one tap.
Accounts aged 13 to 17 can trade. What they cannot do is send an exact clue, so a clue offered by an account under 18 is always an approximate one.
Species cards are never tradable
A species card is a record. It says you saw a Kingfisher, and your collection, your metal ladder, your badges, your XP and the conservation export are all built on top of that claim.
A record that can change hands is a record that can be false. The moment a Kingfisher can arrive in your collection because a friend sent it to you, the collection stops being a statement about what you have seen, the badges stop meaning anything, and the reporting rates the app hopes to one day measure from real walks are contaminated at the source.
So species cards do not move, and this is enforced by the database rather than by the app remembering to check. Exactly two kinds of thing can appear in a trade, and everything else is refused outright — sightings, collection rows, badges, metals, XP, levels and streaks included.
The two things that can move
A copy of an event card. An event card asserts nothing about a bird. It says you were here that spring. It can change hands without making anybody’s record false, which is precisely why the trading feature is built out of it.
A promise to send a clue about one specific sighting of your own. Not the forwarding of a clue somebody sent you.
That distinction is load-bearing. A clue you can forward is a location share with no author and no limit — two hops from a public pin, and the exact thing the app is built to prevent. So a clue in a trade is a pledge: when the trade is accepted, you send a fresh clue, and every rule is checked again at that moment. Including the protected-species refusal, which can turn a pledge made in February into a refusal in April.
If a trade fails, nothing moves
A trade is one transaction. Both sides move, or neither does.
When somebody accepts, every item in the offer is checked again against reality at that moment, rather than trusting what was written down when the offer was made. Between proposing and accepting, a card can have been traded away to somebody else, a sighting can have been deleted, a friendship can have ended, or a bird can have come into its breeding season.
If any check fails, the trade is marked failed and nothing changes hands. You do not lose a card to a half-finished trade, and you never end up having given something and received nothing. The app tells you which part failed.
Reporting a trade
One tap on the trade. Choose a reason and add detail if it helps. The community rules describe what happens next.
If somebody offers you money for a card, or asks you to complete a trade somewhere outside Magpeye, report it. That is the behaviour these rules exist to catch.