Steam Trading Cards

Sent you my Spare #4.

Thanks, much appreciated. :)

So it seems the market is down for me? Anyone able to get in?

It’s been flaky for the last 10 or so hours. It still works, but it just takes a good few tries.

I hope it’s working. I dumped the rest of my globes onto the market since they’ll be gone and I’m hoping to get maybe a $1 out of it total!

Huh… I haven’t played Magic 2014 in about a week. Just fired up Steam and I have a Magic 2014 booster waiting for me.

I swear, I have no idea how this works. I thought you had to be actively playing the game to have a chance at a booster.

You only have to have collected all the card drops for the game. Then you become eligible for boosters.

You are eligible for boosters once you have received all your normal card drops.

edit: Too slow! :D

Ah, ok. I thought it was like the card drops themselves, where the boosters could drop when you’re playing the game. Never realized you got boosters randomly even when not playing. Interesting

Yes, the boosters are triggered by players crafting the badges for a particular game, and then you have a chance of getting one (if you already have your max in-game drops). The higher your Steam level, the higher your chance.

Has anyone figured out if it is worth building your level to a certain amount to get more drops so you can sell the booster packs? I have a lot of games where I only need a couple cards to complete the badge. I could buy a couple cards to complete them, or just sell them. I will hit my limit with the amount of cards i can sell in a calendar year if I try to sell everything.

I bought a handful of cards and traded for others right before the Winter Sale to boost my level to 20 so that I’d get a 40% extra chance of booster drops. Booster drops are based on the amount of badges being created by the community, so during the Winter Sale they should have been dropping like candy on Halloween given the thousands of snow globe badges being crafted. Even with my 40% boost I received not a single booster pack during the entire sale.

So no, my advice would be that it is NOT worth spending any significant amount of money in an effort to reach the next booster drop bonus level. Maybe if you can get there by spending $1 or less, then sure, but anything more than that and you’re wasting your time and money.

Do you have a lot of games where you’ve collected all of the standard drops? I think I’ve gotten 3 boosters over the last month or so. I still have 28 games that I haven’t farmed the cards from. I have 29 games that I have farmed all of the cards from.

I’m level 24, so I have a ways to go to get to 30. I was considering doing the badges for the ones that I need the least amount of cards and selling off the rest. My guess is that I wouldn’t need any out of pocket money, but I would be losing the money from the sale of the cards. It’s too much of a hassle to find people who have duplicates to trade.

Boosters are rare and most of the ones that drop are worthless humble bundle cards.

It’s probably not worth going higher yet. The best time to level was on the first days of the sale… snow globes (you got one free with every badge crafted) were selling for more than an entire set of regular cards.

It was even better in the day before the sale, where all the speculators get on and buy up the cards without knowing their purpose. Globes were going for roughly 80 cents apiece.

I was at Level 18 until the end of the sale and I’ve been getting booster drops like clockwork at the beginning and middle of every single month, give or take a day or two. That was true when I had 6 games eligible for boosters back in July and remained that way till now (I got my last one on the 2nd), when I have 40-something qualifying titles. If an uptick in crafting activity or increasing eligible games affects booster rates in any way, I haven’t seen it. Now that I’m Level 20, I’m curious to see if anything changes at all.

In the last hour or so of the sale, snow globe cards were going for several dollars apiece. If they held out that long, those speculators still would have made a decent profit. I ended up selling my two leftover globes the night before for 30 cents. :(

I read that boosters may drop whenever you craft a badge, not when someone else does. Not sure how accurate that is, but I got my recent X Rebirth booster when I crafted another badge.

From Steam’s FAQ: “Once you have received all of your card drops, you become eligible for a booster pack, which is a set of 3 trading cards that may include both basic and foil cards. Booster packs are granted randomly to eligible users as more badges are crafted by members of the community. Make sure you log in to Steam each week to maintain eligibility.”

My question is, do boosters only drop for the particular game that a community badge was created for? So there wouldn’t be booster drops for snow globes as they are not associated with a particular game?

Yeah I read that too, but you still need to craft something to trigger a drop right? Boosters don’t just appear in your inventory?

You get booster drops just by logging into Steam. There’ll be a Steam new inventory notification when you get one.