Collecting Dungeons and Dragons Trading Cards (Unfortunately)
06.29.08 By Collin David
Back in 1992, when I was 11 years old, I was falling in love with fantasy role playing games. Despite this, I wasn’t at all into Satan. The evilest thing I wanted to meet at the time was a Beholder, and only if I was holding a +6 Sword of Eye Poking. That’s funnier if you know what a Beholder is.
I had inherited a few tattered Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks, but I really wanted to expand upon my gaming repertoire. Because the internet didn’t really exist yet, I had only one other source of information : trading cards (which also held true for my superhero knowledge). For about $1.50, I could buy a pack of ‘Advanced Dungeons and Dragons : 2nd Edition’ trading cards from the local Waldenbooks. I’d go in there once a week and buy a few packs at the counter, take them home, ogle the art and read the mini-biographies of the pictured characters, or the descriptions of neat new weapons and items. What are magical items but externalized superpowers anyhow?
But oh man, were they ugly.
It’s Deanna’s recent exploration of Garbage Pail Kids, and the upcoming Magic : The Gathering National Championships that have brought back some old collecting memories, back from my earliest acquiring days. I dug around under my bed and after some epic battles with spiders and a frightening layer of dust, I reclaimed my D&D cards.
Of course, $1.50 per pack wasn’t a small amount of money when I was 11, so ultimately, I wanted a lot of bang for my buck. Some of the cards managed to inspire a few new character traits and stories that I could incorporate into a game, but most of the cards… well, take a look.
Sure, some of the cards (though not the one pictured at left) had some really wonderful art on them - crisp, expressive stuff that could really evoke a sense of fantasy and inspire art of their own, but none of the artists were credited anywhere on the cards. Unless they chose to sign their image in an area that TSR couldn’t possibly cut it off during production, and signed large enough to be seen in trading card scale, they were anonymous forever. While there are a 
few Brom and Ken Frank cards scattered within the gigantic 500-card set, sometimes…. sometimes it hurts to look at the others. Please avert your eyes if you have any sense of human proportions, decency, or may be pregnant.
This is real ‘stuff I drew with my non-dominant hand in the margins of my notebook during math class after drinking behind the sports shed during lunch’ quality stuff. As we see with the biology and physics lessons that Istha Rockhead’s card provides (pictured above), the pointer finger is the longest finger on the humanoid hand, and one does not need to close one’s hand around the handle of a mace in order to be able to wield it successfully - gravity will surely do the job for you.
Mortos Ironbeard is an evil guy, if only because of his fashion sense. Everyone knows that belly shirts after Labor Day are completely unacceptable. Also, if you’re a 70 year old man. Also, if you’re wearing two shirts and NEITHER reaches below your bellybutton. Don’t be fooled by those embrace-me arms and come-hither grin - his name is Mortos, and ergo predestined for evil, and his bio states that he murders strangers and takes their place - possibly because 
he’s angry about being short. I’m not making that up.
The list of offenses doesn’t end with poorly-painted character cards, though. Getting a dreaded Checklist Card in a $1.50 pack was always a severe disappointment. It always invoked a feeling of “here’s a list of cards that you DIDN’T get because you got this crappy checklist card!”
Of course, nothing was worse than the ‘guy holding a pointed stick’ card, or the exciting card depicting ‘chair’ or ‘belt’. Sure, we want to flesh out the D&D universe in every possible way (the game’s creator even made up a probability table for the exact type of ‘woman of ill repute’ that you could encounter), and there’s a LOT of room to do that with 500 trading cards, but is it truly necessary to acknowledge ‘left big toenail’? I musta had at least a dozen ‘Elven Pancreas’ cards.
Still, I always went back for more. It was something about tearing open the shiny silver-and-purple packs and finding the treasures within, even if they were sometimes unbearable, and even if this next pack contained cards I already had quintriplicates of. It was about always having something new that I could find and come home with, and it was about adding onto a social experience with new bits of knowledge.
Ugly, ugly knowledge.
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Article Tags: D&D, Dungeons and Dragons, Fantasy, trading cards================
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