Just a few days ago, Steam launched its newest feature: Steam Trading Cards. While it is still in Beta at the moment, thousands of users (including myself) have been able to experience this feature already. If you join the official group, you’ll eventually receive an invite. An alternative is having a friend trade you an invite, or buying one off the Steam Market. Let’s break it down by each feature.

The Trading Cards

The most prominent feature is of course the new trading cards that users can obtain. At the moment, there are six games that can award you with trading cards, but many more will be added as time goes by. The six games include:

Counterstrike: Global Offensive

Half-Life 2

Don’t Starve

Portal 2

Team Fortress 2

(Note: Unless you purchased TF2 before it became F2P, you will have to have a certain amount of in-game purchases before you can receive cards.)

(Note: Unless you purchased TF2 before it became F2P, you will have to have a certain amount of in-game purchases before you can receive cards.) Dota 2

(Note: Like TF2, you will have to have a certain amount of in-game purchases before you receive cards)

Now that you know that which games offer the cards, you want to jump right in and collect them all don’t you? Well, at the moment, you cannot collect all the cards by yourself. In fact, you are limited to half the set of each game. For instance, Portal 2 has 8 cards in its set, but the game will only give you 4. Unfortunately, this also means that you can get duplicates. I was playing TF2 and received 2 Scout Cards and 2 Soldier Cards.

So what do you do with your duplicates? Why, you trade them of course! Surely your friends have duplicates too, and are willing to trade for your own.

There are also different rarities of cards (Normal and Foil), and just like buying a pack of cards at the store, you’ll never know what you’re going to get. Also, from the looks of it, there will be different series of cards as time passes, so look forward to that.

So what exactly does collecting all of the cards in a set do? Once you own all of the cards, you can craft them into a badge, and will receive community items as well. For example, I collect all eight of the normal set of Portal 2 cards, crafted them and received the following:

“I’m A Potato!” Badge

“:p2aperture:” Emoticon

“Turrets” Profile Background

“50% OFF Towns” Coupon

(Note: A coupon is not guaranteed to drop)

You can also craft a set again to level up your badges and get more XP. So once I collect the Portal 2 set again, I’ll be able to get the “Chamber Champion” badge.

XP and Steam Levels

Mentioned above, you now have a Steam Level. You can level up by obtaining badges. This is promptly stated in the top right of our BRAND NEW profiles.

New Profiles:

The Trading Card game gives us brand new profiles. They can showcase quite a few things:

Profile Background (For instance, my steam profile has the turret background)

Your Steam Level

Your Favorite Badge (You can set this on your badges page)

Your Recent Activity

An easier way to view a person’s Games, Screenshots, Videos and more.

All in all, this is a pretty exciting new feature for Steam users. Sure, it’s somewhat gimmicky, but it’s still fun. Being able to collect cards as I play games and then being able to trade them for others is a great way to play more games or even go back to games I haven’t played in a long time.

What is your favorite feature? Leave a comment below!