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You do not need to arrive with a finished multiplier for every card. A connected assistant can first read your existing rules and inventory, help you separate the groups that need different treatment, then prepare one reviewed rule proposal. The conversation is useful even if you decide not to apply anything. Start with the store connection overview or Talk to your store if you have not connected an assistant yet. A weekly read-only check of suggestions, pricing gaps, and recent movers is a good way to decide whether a rule needs attention before you prepare a matrix. For the decision behind the rules—not just the clicks—read how to use AI to build smarter TCGplayer pricing rules. If many cards seem stuck, run a store-wide pricing diagnosis before changing any rule.

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Step 1: Audit what you already have

“List my active pricing rules and show where they overlap, leave cards uncovered, or match cards but never govern them. Include the game and affected-card counts. Don’t change anything.”
This is a read. Ask it to check sync health first if the inventory scope may be stale. A rule that matches a card is not necessarily the rule that wins; priority and more specific rules matter. This is the difference between asking an assistant to be a pricing analyst and asking it to invent a blanket multiplier.

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Step 2: Describe the strategy, not a single rule

“Set up separate pricing rules for bulk, foils, and my protected inventory.”
or more specific:
“Bulk under $2 at 1.05x, foils at 1.20x, everything on my Reserved List bookmark never goes below market.”
Ask it to explain the plan before preparing it: which inventory segments belong together, which price source each uses, where a floor or protection should apply, and what the plan deliberately leaves alone. Then have it assemble one pricing change set covering the rules you described. It prepares the proposal; Hoard, not the assistant, applies it after your approval. A proposed rule is not an arbitrary one-card manual price override. You get a single Hoard review page for the whole matrix — every rule, exact before/after settings, matched-card counts, listed-value impact, and any protected-card warnings, all in one place. Check at least one sample card from each segment, especially a foil, a cheap card, and anything you mean to protect. Matched-card counts show scope; they are not a forecast of sales or margin.

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Step 4: Approve

Click Approve and apply only after you have checked the scope and impact. All the rules in the matrix apply together, in one transaction. If you do not approve it, no matrix rule applies.

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Why it’s all-or-nothing

Pricing change sets don’t apply partially. If one targeted rule changed after the proposal was prepared, or one rule in the set fails a safety check, Hoard applies none of them — not “the ones that passed.” If that happens, ask your assistant to refresh the proposal rather than trying to re-submit the same one. You can also reject the whole matrix with feedback, which the assistant can use to prepare a revised version — useful if one rule in an otherwise-good matrix needs adjusting rather than starting over.

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What can make a matrix too large or ambiguous

Two things worth knowing before you ask for something sprawling:
  • A single change set caps out at five enable/disable actions. Ask for more than that in one go and you’ll need to split it into a couple of proposals instead of one.
  • Every rule needs to be scoped to a single game. If your ask implies multiple games at once without saying so, the assistant needs to either scope it per game or you’ll need to explicitly allow the cross-game path — otherwise the engine would silently apply it to only the first game.