What is dCity and the Top 400?

#dCity is a "spreadsheet" game, with a friendly UI, based around trading NFTs. These NFTs are cards, each representing a section of what you may expect to find within a city. This could be a Basic Home, Public Restroom, Student, Airport, etc. Each type of card has their own values for different properties (which the game refers to as attributes), such as if the card generates or expends Income, Population, Education, etc., with some cards having the special attributes, like Tax Refund or War Shares (which I will not be going into, in this post, as they have no bearing on the Top 400).

Being in the top 400, for any of the major rankings, will allow you to be eligible for Ranking Rewards, which is a SIM reward that is distributed daily.
The major rankings are Income, Population, Popularity, Education and Creativity.

Being in the top 400 accounts on the Income rankings and connecting your dCity account to your discord account, in the official dCity Discord Server, will grant you a rare role, "Top400". The role grants access to view the SIM CLUB category of text channels and discuss various topics with other members of the club. This is not to be confused with SIMMILLIONAIRE, which is granted for holding upwards of 1 Million SIM Power.
Along with the role, being in the top 400 for Income (for the latest distribution of rewards) allows you to claim a free citizen every 24 hours. This is at least a guaranteed Young Citizen card. Side Note: If you work up to becoming a SIMMILLIONAIRE, you can follow the same claims process for a chance at a Student card. If you own the randomly rolled card, you will be granted a Student instead of the Young Citizen. If you do not, you will be granted the Young Citizen. The stats of these cards can be seen here:

Not only does the Young Citizen card already give 1 Tax Refund, it also 'grows up' to become a Student. Student, in turn, can 'grow up' to become a Student (Debt) card. The stats of this card can be seen above. I will talk more about the usefulness of this in the following sections.

Why should I care about the Top 400?

$$$
Jokes aside, there is a lot to be gained from rising through the Income rankings. You get Ranking Rewards (Income is currently lobbied to 54.62% for Income Reward) and a free daily citizen card (typically worth upwards of 800 SIM).

The current 400th Tax Adjusted Income is 10 SIM per day. This means that after crisis, crime and tax have been calculated, it only takes 11 income to be in the top 400. How to get that will be explained later in this post.
After the 100% tax era began, where there used to be many cities with 10 SIM per day, within the Top 400, there is now only 1. This means that very soon, the number to beat will be greater than 10. As time goes on and mayors realise the shift in meta, remaining in the Top 400 will become increasingly more difficult.

Looking down the Rankings page, you can see that the red SIM number (the Ranking Reward) changes, based on where you are positioned, within the top 400. You are not only fighting for access to the discord channels and free daily citizen, but also for a larger slice of the reward pool.

Okay. So, how do I join this elite group?

For starters, you will want to know that this is only one of the many ways to play the game and one of many ways to earn, within dCity.
As it stands, the only way to grow your Tax Adjusted Income and to rise through the Income Ranking, is via the use of Tax Refund cards. These cards either increase or reduce your Tax Refund, which in turn is used to offset how much Tax is paid each day. For Tax Refund cards to work, you must have a base income that is being taxed by the dCity government. As tax is currently over 100% (even after all tax reduction methods are active), any income that is not stolen by criminals, lost in crisis events, etc., will be taxed. This makes the maths one step simpler, since we can claim up to 100% of the remaining income, through Tax Refund.

[Note: Example numbers] If your Max income (no tax) is 1000 and Current tax (after tax reduction) is 100% (100%), you will have an after tax income of exactly 0. As long as you had no crimes or income affecting crisis events, etc., that 1000 is now the maximum amount that you can reclaim, via Tax Refund. Since Young Citizen has +1 Tax Refund, being a part of the Top 400 and only getting Tax Refund from claiming your daily free citizen would take you 1000 successful claims to reach this cap. Any additional Tax Refund (over the example 1000) will be ignored, since you cannot refund more tax than your income was originally taxed.

As previously mentioned, the current number of this Tax Adjusted Income to beat is 10. That is fairly low and very easily attainable, as thousands of the cities are still laid out for the older strategies, before the tax was increased above 100%. Keep an eye on Ranking > Main Rankings > Income, for the most up to date target numbers.

As a smaller city, you will be hit harder by crime, especially if you do not have income headroom. Whilst the 100% tax rate is active, it may be easy to fall into a false sense of security. Your city will still suffer the effects as crime is calculated before tax. There are some cards that, when stolen, reduce your income by a flat amount. If one of these cards is deactivated for the day (Since the game doesn't remove your NFT from your account. Stolen is a gamified term to say temporarily not used for calculations), you also lose income that can no longer be taxed. This means that, using the previous 1000 example, you may only have a maximum of 850 taxable income. If you are in this position and have 1000 Tax Refund, you will still only be able to claim up to 850 back in Tax refund.
If you only have as little as 150 Max income (no tax) and suffer the example 150 SIM crime, you could be knocked out of the top 400 in Income Ranking and not be eligible for the free citizen claim, for that day. To combat this, you can purchase cards that decrease the crime rate in your city.

There are several cards that increase Income and Tax Refund. Buildings that include Income may also need Workers, in order for the card to be active and grant the card's other properties. Whilst there is a card named "Worker" and one named "Workers", the card attribute is actually referencing Population, which is another of the game's mechanics. You can track your Population and People to hire on the city map.
Cards that require Workers are filled from oldest first. So, make sure to take this into account if you do not have enough Population to fill all of the available positions.

As well as crime reducing your income, there are also crisis events that may reduce the number of your population that are working. If they become sick, you may not have enough workers to fill your worker requirements.
This is important for growing your income (and available tax refund amount) as you may have Income cards that are inactive, reducing the Max income (no tax) that I previously explained.
Cards with Population: 1 (or higher) will more than likely be classed as Citizen cards, although exceptions to this do exist. Luxury Home is an example of a card that has both Income and Population, but does not require any Workers.
Popularity is one way to grow your Population, without needing extra Population on your cards (it scales up your base Population. If you have 100 Population and 50% bonus from Popularity, you will have a useable Population of 150, etc.). There are even cards that have a mixture of both Population and Popularity, such as the Clown citizen.

Possibly the most efficient card that you can mine, for this Income + Tax Refund strategy, is the Economist card. This card can be obtained as a random chance, from Student Training (Student Debt page of the City Dashboard). This card has both +1 Tax Refund and +3 Income, along with a couple of other useful attributes. Consistently selling for around 1200-1450 SIM on the market, this card is worth its salt. If you get into the Top 400, claim your daily free Young Citizen, wait until the card becomes a Student, then becomes a Student (Debt) and then pay the training fee (currently only 130 SIM, but is increasing by an additional 10 SIM per month), you could potentially snowball from solely this one gameplay loop.

Final words

The President has various settings that they can change, to affect the game. If you would like to see an end to the 100% tax era, Run For President and see if you can change enough of the mayors' minds, to dethrone @ecoinstant.

To round this all off, I would like to say thank you for reading or skimming through this mini-guide on how the Top 400 functions. I have seen similar posts, although I believe that I have been able to add enough extra information to have made this post worthwhile. Additional information on systems and a list of the full card list can be found in other #dCity posts and on the game's Info page.