Craft or sell?

Should you craft that card set, or sell it?

Every badge craft grants exactly 100 XP — whether the set cost 23 cents or 76 dollars. That makes crafting a valuable set the most expensive mistake in Steam levelling. Enter what a set is worth and see which way round earns more XP.

The numbers behind this

• Median set price: $0.73 — the midpoint across 13,704 Steam card sets, sampled July 25, 2026.
• Market fee: about 15%, the standard Steam Community Market cut on a sale.
• XP per craft: 100, fixed for every game badge regardless of which game or how many cards.

Prices drift. These figures are stated here rather than buried in the code so you can check them against the Market yourself before acting on a valuable set.

One caveat on selling: proceeds arrive as Steam Wallet funds, which can't be withdrawn to a bank. That's fine here, because the whole point is spending them on more card sets — but it isn't cash.

Why an expensive set is worth more sold than crafted

Steam grants XP for crafting a badge out of a complete trading card set, and the amount is always the same: 100 XP per craft. It doesn't matter whether the set came from a game nobody has heard of or a collector's item worth more than a new release. Set size doesn't change it either — a six-card set and a fifteen-card set are both one craft, both 100 XP. That single flat rule is what turns this decision into a pure question of price.

So the question is never "is this set valuable?" but "how much XP does that value buy?". A set worth $12.00 crafts into 100 XP. Sold, the same set nets around $10.20 once the Market takes its cut, and at the median set price that buys roughly thirteen other sets — thirteen crafts, about 1,300 XP. Identical value, thirteen times the levels, for the price of a few extra clicks.

The break-even sits just under a dollar: the median set price divided by what's left after the Market fee. Below it, a sale won't even buy back one replacement set, so crafting wins. Above it, selling wins — and because the median set price is the divisor, the advantage grows in direct proportion to what the set is worth. A $76 set isn't a slightly worse craft than a $12 one; it's six times worse.

Two things this deliberately doesn't model. Time: thirteen purchases and thirteen crafts take longer than one click, and a Market listing has to actually find a buyer. And badge caps: each game badge stops granting XP after five crafts, so "buy thirteen cheap sets" means at least three different games rather than thirteen of the same one. Neither reverses the answer — they only tell you what the extra XP costs in effort.

The same arithmetic is why buying complete sets in bulk works at all: measured in XP per dollar, ordinary sets beat valuable ones every time. Crafting an expensive set is the one move that gets that backwards.

• Read more: crafting yourself vs buying card sets — the full market data
• Read more: the most expensive Steam trading cards
• Read more: the cheapest way to level up on Steam

Median prices are a market snapshot, not live figures. Check the Steam Community Market before acting on a high-value set.