Are you familiar with Steam’s trading cards? It’s a neat little system where if you play a certain number of the many games in your Steam library that support the feature, you’re rewarded with these digital cards based on the game. They have a little picture of what they’re supposed to represent and, if you’re lucky, a fun description to go with it. They can be used to create badges for those same titles, which then reward you with wallpapers and emoticons, or they can be sold to other players on the Steam marketplace for small amounts of very real money, though they mostly just clog up my inventory and get looked at from time to time, at least in my case.
However, I recently learned from a friend that these simple trading cards actually contain more art than they seem to offer at first glance. If you go to your library and select a game that supports trading cards, you can click on these cards and Steam will open a new window with a landscape version of that image, perfect for your desktop background. However, this is not just a blown up image, but an expanded one, usually offering more detail than the thumbnail. Sometimes the thumbnail only shows a small part of a larger, more interesting image, and sometimes the blown up image isn’t even the same as the thumbnail!
ELDEN RING
I checked and you can see these images if you go to your badges and click on the cards you have there. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a way to do this from the inventory, which is where I usually look at my cards since that’s where the fun descriptions can be read, but it’s very nice that there are at least two ways to look at these large pieces of art. Even better though, you can still access these landscape images even after you create a badge. Unfortunately, if you simply sell the card, you will lose the image, but that’s OK.
Since this seems to be the case with every single card I own, I assume this feature of trading cards has been there since the beginning, or at least almost since the beginning. However, I’ve never heard of this being a feature in Steam. Maybe I’m just living under a rock, but the people I’ve talked to about it didn’t know about it either, and even the friend who brought it to my attention only recently found out about it herself.
Vampire Survivors
However, since it seems to be such an old feature, I assume many readers already know about it and may find it odd that I’m only learning about it now (after selling a lot of my cards…), but something like this can be very easy to miss, even if it seems to be right in the eye for some people.
While this is very cool and will prevent me from selling a lot of cards I might have otherwise, the main thing I learned here is that there are two ways to make a Steam trading card super cool: fun descriptions and fun “secret” art. The most important thing I got, though, is a very cool new wallpaper for my desktop.
BlazBlue: Chronophantasma Expansion
