A gamer is reincarnated to when a game first came out. He was on a team and was kicked / dropped. He restarts the game and picks a hidden class which is based on capturing essences in cards and combining them. Before his restart he had trained a top player who used this class. Dungeons have limits to the number of times they can be cleared. In order to access the second large area of the game he solos a large two headed ogre and starts selling maps of the second area via an NPC. He started a hidden quest line to be some sort of shadow lord and in the second game area becomes a merchant by completing some super long chain quest.
Sounds like strongest sword god in some places, but doesn't match the card thing at all. Will lurk since it sounds interesting.
That's not it, but thanks for the suggestion, that's a story I haven't read yet. Additional details that I'm remembering. You can earn titles in the game and I think one of them is to clear a certain number of waves of enemies during the tutorial. The game devs took some of the titles out in his past life because they were never found.
it almost made me think it was https://www.novelupdates.com/series/the-amber-sword/ but he wasn't trained and he went to that world .... shame the translator seems to have went in to gaming limbo ...