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Does anyone else actively collect steam trading cards? I find it a fun minigame within the steam community.

furthermore, what are your thoughts on the system? Is it good, does it do anything useful or fun for you?

Is it an actual game or just there silly gamer score system?

If it was an actual TCG i think it could of been cool.

 Desubot wrote:
Is it an actual game or just there silly gamer score system?

If it was an actual TCG i think it could of been cool.

gamer score system, but you get card drops for playing games through steam. crafting badges from cards ups your steam level and gets you exclusives.

Sounds really Vain and meh.

would of been much better as an actual game.

 Desubot wrote:
Sounds really Vain and meh.

would of been much better as an actual game.

It generally is a fun collection mechanic. feeds into collectors ocd

I guess thats true

anyone have any favorite card sets? I like the total war sets, mostly because the exclusive unlocks are nice wallpapers.

I sell the cards as soon as I get them. Didn't find the game to be interesting during this steam sale.

I also just sell them, and use that money to help buy my next game.

What kind of exclusives do they unlock?

I have a crap ton sitting there in my inventory thing. Never bothered with them. Woo, I can sell this one for five pence! This one goes for fifty pence, woah I can almost buy a bar of chocolate for that! Ahem, a bit of a gimmick to me, and not something I especially care for. I don't think they work with all games either, or at least their seemingly random system of distribution is unknown to me. I've played hundreds of hours in Skyrim and came away with only a handful of cards, if that. I play an hour of Borderlands and have two cards...

I keep 1 original copy of any card I get and sell the rest for, like, a dime each. After awhile, I have a few bucks in my Steam wallet that I can use to get a cheap DLC or whatever.

I'm in the "Sell them all then buy two games for the 4 bucks I made during a sale" camp

The trading cards are an odd thing on Steam. You can collect them and trade them in for experience when you have a full deck, or you can sell them. Stupid thing is, if you have a lot of friends and want to play with them or add them to your contacts, you'll need to keep gaining XP to expand your friend slots by +5 with every odd level, IIRC.

Biggest problem though is that the game developers decide how many cards go into a deck. So, one game may require as little as five cards, whereas Space Marine, which has recently also joined the trading card mob, requires you to collect a whopping fifteen cards!

gakky ones at that.. I mean, some have really nice art that nicely doubles as wallpaper, like..

Infested Planet:



Or Tomb Raider:



Then there's the cards like those of Space Marine which instead has simple renders on their cards.

Renders of the characters in almost their default "T" position of all things too. Put that down to that being an old game which probably had one guy making those cards who was being paid a pittance. They could have just taken a piece of concept art for that material, but that's clearly the mark of them throwing up cards because they think they should and doing just the bare minimum for them.

Huh, Steam accounts have levels? It seems odd that they'd cap your friends based on the cards, but I suppose that's to stop spammers. Not that I have a clue at all how that XP system works or any of the stuff revolving around cards. I've been at level ten for over a year at least, despite playing hundreds of hours and gaining a few cards (seriously what are the rules for handing out cards. I have barely any despite my hours...). Meh, Steam's just a platform for playing games, unless any of the extra crap actually effects the games I play then I couldn't give a crap. At least games like Skyrim tied in the achievements to perks in the game IIRC.

You have X-amount of "friend slots" per level, so if you're a social butterfly and have lots and lots of friends you want to add to your Steam account, you'll need to level that sucker up.

There's also other stuff you get, like extra slots on your profile page to show off your favourite game, achievements you like and whatnot. A fun addition, but ultimately pretty useless unless you're the kind of DUDEBRO who loves showing off his mighty electronic willy.

Also, to earn the XP you must collect a whole set of cards and "cash" those in for the XP and other stuff like emotes and a unique wallpaper. Plus, even though you've traded in those cards, you can still click them and see the image in full-size and all.

I thought of them as a sort of stock - market style of thing, since the prices rise and fall. Buy low, sell a bit higher, maybe make a small profit.

It varies from game to game. When a game is released with cards or an older game adds in the cards as a feature, the prices usually sky-rocket for a while, but will plummet once some time has passed.

Hmmm...I'll confess to having collected a number of sets (6 or 7) - basically by selling cards for sets I'm not interested in, to get funds to complete sets I am.. I also confess that I have no real idea why I do this - I'm steam level 15 but have no interest in adding 'friends' or using the system in any other way. Perhaps I'll go and put the rest of the cards I have up for sale and try to kick the habit.....:-)

Same, I collect cards I like, Keep rares like foils (I have 2 foils) plus I also have like 4 sets of warband, and 2 of Kerbal space program.

Its just something fun.

You can make money with them?

I've got loads in my inventory I don't care for so I might look into selling them. How exactly does that work?

Tibbsy wrote:
You can make money with them?

I've got loads in my inventory I don't care for so I might look into selling them. How exactly does that work?

Well... keep in mind, it's not a whole lot. A few cents actually, but good for saving up for low-priced indie games.

If you click on the card in your inventory, look at the card's description on the right. It should say some sort of current value the card has. Underneath the description is the option to sell it on the marketplace. A window will pop up, asking how much you want to receive from it. Keep in mind, the buyer will have to pay a bit more than you'll receive. Accept the terms and conditions to this, click the green, "put it on marketplace," button and you're good to go!

We use a bot to automatically sell the cards. They might not sell for much individually but it quickly adds up.

Important note: deactivate notifications. Learned it the hard way when I suddenly had 51 new e-mails from Steam.

Well last night I spent about 20 minutes putting all my cards on the market place, and as of the last time I looked at it I'd made about 2 quid

Not too shabby I suppose, I think that's most of them gone, and that'll give me a nice little discount to the next game I buy.

If anyone is interested in getting some of the rewards (personalized emoticons and background for your profile page) that comes from crafting a badge with a full set of cards, this website lists them for almost every game :
http://steamtradingcards.wikia.com/wiki/They_Bleed_Pixels