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Forums - PC Discussion - Official Steam trading card thread - check your queue twice a day to get free trading cards during the winter sale

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The Official Steam Trading Card Thread

 

FAQ

What are Steam trading cards really?

Well, it's pretty simple. Each game has a set of cards (from 5 to 15 cards per set) you can collect, and if you collect a full set you can craft a badge. Crafting a badge will net you 100 XP and will also drop an emoticon and a profile background. The badge is yours to keep, and you can feature it on your profile page for e-peen points :-3

But how do I get trading cards?

Each game has a certain amount of allocated free card drops, equal to about half of a set, which you get simply by playing the game. Other then that, there are three ways to get trading cards. a) you can buy them on the Steam marketplace, b) you can trade (with both friends and strangers) and c) receive booster packs.

Booster packs, what's that?

A booster pack is just a pack containing 3 trading cards. When you have received all of your allocated card drops for a game, you become eligible for a booster pack for said game. A booster pack is given out when a badge for that game is created. You are only eligible for booster packs if you have been online in the last 7 days, so make sure you log onto Steam often to remain eligible for booster pack drops! You can also get booster packs by breaking down cards into so called gems and then turn the gems into booster packs, but I strongly reccomend against this, because you'll destroy cards and other items that have a far higher value than what the cards you'll get in the booster pack will be worth. You are better off just buying the cards from the marketplace in that case.

Great, but why should I care about trading cards to begin with?

Of course, you are free to ignore them, but trading and buying/selling cards to complete sets can be fun in and of itself. In addition, even if you don't want to craft any badges or anything like that, you can always just sell your cards on the market and get back a few cents which you can use to purchase other games. If you get booster pack drops relatively often (which, I'll admit, takes a huge library of eligible games, and also a relatively high Steam level), you can even get enough money from that to purchase a few games per year (doesn't sound like much, but free stuff without any effort is always welcome, right?).



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Tips & Tricks

Buying and selling cards

If you are going to buy a card, don't just put in the price as what the lowest seller is asking for. Heck, don't even put it as what the highest buyer is bidding. Instead, put your price as slightly lower than what the highest buying price is.

As you can see there, the lowest price a seller is asking for is 0.54 kr (the currency is in Norwegian Kroner. 1 USD ~ 8.5 NOK). Meanwhile, the highest buy bid is 0.51 kr. You shouldn't go for either of these. Instead, you should settle slightly below, perhaps at 0.49 or 0.48.

The same applies if you are selling, but in the reverse. In this specific case, you should perhaps ask for 0.58 as your selling price.

It'll only make you a little bit extra per transaction, but it adds up eventually, and there's no need to waste money, even if it's only a couple of cents.



reserved



Uhh...is this new?



 

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12/22/2016- Made a bet with Ganoncrotch that the first 6 months of 2017 will be worse than 2016. A poll will be made to determine the winner. Loser has to take a picture of them imitating their profile picture.

hershel_layton said:
Uhh...is this new?

The trading card program was implemented in june 2013.



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I don't even know what I have. I've always ignored the "new item in your inventory" thing.



pokoko said:
I don't even know what I have. I've always ignored the "new item in your inventory" thing.

FREE money awaits by selling what you have ignored




Twitter @CyberMalistix

Never really payed too much attention to trading cards, but sometimes I will go out of my way to get level 5 badges for games I like, such as Metro 2033 or Undertale.

Tagging.



"Just for comparison Uncharted 4 was 20x bigger than Splatoon 2. This shows the huge difference between Sony's first-party games and Nintendo's first-party games."

malistix1985 said:
pokoko said:
I don't even know what I have. I've always ignored the "new item in your inventory" thing.

FREE money awaits by selling what you have ignored

Yeah, especially Visual Novels with cute girls on sale or in bundles almost pay for themselves if you sell the trading cards. ;)



Conina said:
malistix1985 said:

FREE money awaits by selling what you have ignored

Yeah, especially Visual Novels with cute girls on sale or in bundles almost pay for themselves if you sell the trading cards. ;)

Yea, I made a little fortune at times selling backgrounds and emotes etc, Also I found out earlier this year that I had 2 items on Team Fortress 2 from a christmas sale reward that sold for £27 each :D Also got a few skins of Warframe and PoE that are worth £3-7 each.

You can pretty much fund crafting your badges by selling rewards, If you buy a game when it first releases you are usually better off selling the cards as soon as they drop for very inflated prices and coming back in a couple of months later and buy a few sets of cards for the price you sold your free drops :) Which also gives you items to sell on for more cards if you wish.