Trading is an invaluable way to get diamond stuff in the game without spending your actual money. You can get cards from a variety of sources, and trade them with your friends, org members or even total randos.
Sources of Cards
- Friendship tasks are your best way of getting good cards. I can't emphasize this enough. Visiting your friends gets you up to three cards per day and they're high-quality ones. Maybe silver booster quality? I'm not sure they're drawn from the exact same pool, but they're certainly way better than bronze ones.
- Booster packs: You get a free bronze booster every day, usually full of junk. (F'in' tea trees, am I right?) You can buy silver or gold boosters for diamonds, but don't; it's not worth it. Each booster pack has eight cards and you can flip four for free; you can flip more for diamonds but that's not worth it either. Don't get into gambling here; it doesn't work out.
- NPCs: These dudes - and the treasure chest, which is just a stationary NPC - give okay cards, including sometimes employee teams, but don't stress over 'em.
Sources of Trades
- Your friends
- Your org mates - This is as good a reason as any to join an org. You'll get like 30 more trading partners. It's not a bad idea to try to be friends with people who aren't in your org, to maximize your trading partners.
- Randos: If you put up a trade and someone else puts up the exact opposite trade - like you want a bald eagle for a llama and someone you've never even met wants a llama for a bald eagle - that trade will automatically go through. This doesn't happen very often.
Trading Tips
- You can trade for nearly all diamond animals, enclosures, enclosure items & decos, other decos, plants and buildings.
- Some notable exceptions: recently-released bonus animals won't be available yet. A few items, seemingly at random, aren't available. (Small jungle enclosures, for instance.)
- It's not always intuitive which pieces will be easy to trade for and which will be hard. Don't go by the dollar value on the piece; that's just about meaningless. You'll probably get the hang of it.
- Don't bother to trade for ZD items (as opposed to diamond items). They require many more pieces and it generally won't work out for you.
- The pieces you get will change as you level up. So if you're level 30, don't expect to get any cards for African Buffalos (level 81); you won't. The higher the level of the item you want, the harder it'll be to get people to part with their pieces - so trying to trade for that African Buffalo when you're level 30 is going to be very, very difficult for you. Best to stick with items around your own level or, like, 5 or 10 levels higher.
- For this reason, it's great to have friends of higher levels than you, or an org with higher-level members. They'll have oodles of cards that you never see.
Trading piece-only items
There are a few things that you can only get by trading:
- Four-toed hedgehog
- Secretary bird
- Pot-bellied pig
- Kakapo
- Sulphur-breasted cockatoo
- Arapaima
- Common octopus
- Mhorr gazelle, which comes in every bronze booster pack but you need 100 of 'em so buckle in
Probably some other stuff that I can't remember right now.