The shadow card filter. A low budget way in.

The idea in one line

Buy cheap defenders that already have a Shadow chemistry style applied, and sell them for what a shadowed card is actually worth.

That is the whole thing. It works because a chemistry style is applied to the card and travels with it, so when somebody lists a card they have been using, the Shadow goes with it. A lot of people list at the plain price without noticing.

Why the gap exists

A Shadow costs 4,700 coins on its own, as of 23 October 2026. So a card with one already applied is worth the card plus about 4,700, and a seller who prices the card alone is handing that to whoever buys it.

Three reasons the gap survives:

• Quick selling. People clearing a club list at whatever the app suggests, and the suggestion does not know about the style.
• Nobody checks. On a 4,000 coin card, most sellers are not going to spend two minutes working out whether the style changes the price.
• It is invisible in a list. You only see the applied style when you look at the card itself, so casual buyers scrolling the market miss it too.

That last one is also the catch, and we will come back to it.

Finding the cards on fut.gg

You want cards where the shadowed price is a long way above the plain price, in a band low enough that you can run several at once.

1. Open this fut.gg search. It is set to gold cards, 80 or higher, in defensive positions, priced 3,000 to 10,000.
2. Work down the list and check each card's price with and without a Shadow.
3. Keep the ones where the shadowed price is at least 2,000 coins higher. Anything less and the tax eats it.
4. Write down the plain price and the shadow price for each. That is your filter list.

Five or six cards is plenty. You are looking for a repeatable gap, not a jackpot.

A real example: Carreras

Carreras sits at roughly 3,000 coins plain. With a Shadow applied he goes for about 8,000.

So the play is to buy him at under 6,800 with the Shadow already on and sell at 7,900. That sounds like no margin at all until you remember what you are really doing: you are buying a card for a price that is still under what shadowed ones go for, from someone who listed without thinking about it.

Work the tax through, because it decides everything here. EA takes 5% of the sale price, not of your profit.

About 700 a card. Small, repeatable and dull, which is the point. Snipe ten to twenty an hour once a filter is running and that is 7,000 to 14,000 coins an hour on this margin alone. Work the cards where the gap is wider, the ones that nearly double with a Shadow on, and 15,000 to 30,000 an hour is on the table, all from a starting balance under 10,000.

Our EA tax calculator will do the sum for any pair of numbers, and the tax explainer covers why the break even price is always higher than people expect.

Setting the filter

In the Web App, search the transfer market for the player by name, and set your Max Buy Now to the number you worked out: for Carreras, 6,800.

Here is the part people miss. You cannot filter the market by applied chemistry style. There is no box for it. So the filter catches every listing at or under your price, shadowed or not, and the ones without a Shadow are the ones you do not want at that price.

Two ways to handle that:

• Price under the plain card. If the card is 3,000 plain, a Max Buy Now of 3,000 means anything you catch is a bargain whether it has a style or not. Slower, but nothing you buy is a mistake.
• Price for the shadow and check as you go. Faster and more profitable, and it means watching the run rather than leaving it. Anything you catch without a style, relist at the plain price and move on.

Build a list of five or six and work through them one filter at a time, moving on when one goes quiet. Our filters guide covers the settings, and price checking matters more here than the buying does.

Selling them

List at the shadow price, not a coin under. The whole margin is the style, so undercutting by 500 to shift it quickly gives away a third of your profit.

One hour listings during a busy evening, longer overnight. And do not dump six of the same card at once, because you will be competing with yourself and the price will come down to meet you.

Where people go wrong

• Forgetting the tax. An 1,100 coin gap on a 7,900 coin sale is not 1,100 profit. It is about 700.
• Chasing one card. Supply runs out. Have five on your list and move to the next one when it goes quiet.
• Buying at the shadow price without checking. If it has no style you have paid full whack for a plain card.
• Picking cards nobody wants. The gap only exists on cards people actually use. An 80 rated defender in a dead league has no shadow premium because nobody is buying him either way.
• Sharing the filter. Yes, including this one. The more people running it, the thinner it gets.

Doing it while you do something else

This filter rewards volume. The margin per card is small, the work per card is identical, and the limit on what you make is simply how many listings you can get to first.

Doing it by hand means sitting there refreshing one search for an evening. The listings you want are gone in under a second, so you will catch a fraction of them, and you will be bored within twenty minutes.

That is the whole reason our autobuyer exists. Set the filter, set your Max Buy Now, press start, and it buys the moment something lands under your price while you do literally anything else. One payment of £7.99 gets you a month of it, nothing renews, and every feature is switched on from the moment you activate.

Automate this one and you will win more of them, simply because you are there for every listing instead of the handful you happened to be looking at. Make coins while you do other things.