Trading cards

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Not to be confused with the Steam Trading Cards, virtual cards earned by playing games on Steam.
TF2 Trading cards.png
Yo, I oughta' be on a baseball card!
The Scout

The Team Fortress 2 trading cards are produced by Valve and are sold through the Valve Store. They were designed by the TF2 art team and originally intended to be distributed at cyber cafès as part of a promotion, but the promotion never began. There are nine class cards (one for each class), six map cards, three weapon cards, and one Team Fortress 2 card. Each of the class cards provides a biography about that class. Some card images were released by Valve directly on the TF2 Official Website, while other images were not officially released and were instead scanned manually by the community.

The class cards were also included as merchandise with the RED and BLU fan kits that were available directly through the Valve Store. Along with other assorted items, the fan kits came with two packs of TF2 trading cards, each containing five random cards. Trading cards used to be available separately (1 pack for US $1), but they are no longer sold on the Valve Store.

A set of digital trading cards were released on May 15th when the Steam Trading Cards Group went into beta. Once in the beta owners of TF2 would receive up to five random cards shown below, with the rest having to be traded. Upon collecting all nine, they can craft them to get a badge, a random emoticon, a Steam coupon, and a class based background.

Class cards

Map cards

Weapon cards

Team Fortress 2 card

Steam Trading Cards

Main article: Steam Trading Cards

Trivia

Trading card packaging
Trading cards store page
  • Despite the fact that these cards list a prospective biography for each class, some of the biographies have since been altered by Valve in order to more effectively complement the new content that they have released during updates, as well as other forms of published material.
    • The most notable example of this would be the Demoman's biography, which originally said that his parents both died when he was six and that he lived in an orphanage after their deaths. In the amended version released after the WAR! Update, his real parents took him in and taught him to be a proper Demoman, hence the existence of Mrs. DeGroot, his mother.
    • Other such liberties were taken with the Spy's biography, released with the Meet the Spy video, which is far different from the original trading card version. This is mostly because the trading cards were created much earlier in TF2's life, prior to any of the class updates.
  • The packs are not random, and are composed of a limited number of possible card combinations.
  • The text on the store page description reads as follows: "As we all know, Jonas Salk invented trading cards in 1955 so he would have a way to earn a living from his polio vaccine. Before that, people just traded things they found for things that other people had found. So you might "trade" somebody a scrap of carpet, say, in exchange for an old bottle. It was a perfect system with only one drawback: people spent their lives bartering for piles of garbage before dying of polio. But wait. What if we told you that you could barter for things that weren't garbage, AND not die of polio? Introducing TF2 Trading Cards. One pack contains five card designs. 19 designs in complete set."

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