A friend of mine (and player in several of my games) gave me an old pack of TSR Collector Cards for my birthday. Many thanks to him, as I found these interesting enough to write about. Let’s dive in.
First Impressions
These are cheap. They are labeled as “collector cards,” but they don’t have any of the slickness you might expect from more modern products. That makes sense, as these came out in 1992… the year before Magic: The Gathering (“MtG” henceforth) completely changed how card-based game products were made and sold.
These seem to be made of a rough cardstock, without any lamination or other finishing. They’re sized at 2.5 x 3.5 inches. The pack begins with several collector checklists, and each card includes “trading cards” near the logo at the top. I suppose the idea is that people would swap what they were missing with others to complete the full set. Pre-MtG, baseball cards would have been the most likely point of reference for US-based TSR, so I assume that was the model they were working from. The format is picture on the front, stats on the back.
Granola OatTreat
The contents of one of the cards immediately raise the question: what are these cards actually for? The card provides some information about the pictured character, but it’s not really enough detail for game use, either as an NPC combat encounter, or as a pregen PC. Nearly half of the card is given over to a three-sentence background, which is painfully inefficient in using its space, with loose and flowery language (“He had no love for armor, though, or the making of it…”)
Hey look, we pulled both of the Oaktree brothers. I picture the Oaktree brothers as second-run rivals to the Oakridge Boys.
The cards in this pack are all NPCs, and they have big “let me tell you about my home game” energy, a trap that TSR and other RPG publishers often stumbled into in the earlier days of the hobby. It’s hard to blame them; I imagine everyone thought they were on the verge of creating the next Dragonlance-style hit. Everything on the back of the “Cain Blizzard” card could fly in a home game, but is pretty embarrassing as a product intended to be sold to the public, from the goofy character name to the excessive multiclassing to the confusing backstory (he finds mixing with others difficult, but was still chosen as an emissary to the world?)
Jadethread!
The art on those first few Greyhawk cards is pretty bland – lacking the roughshod, outsider charm of very early D&D, but not professional enough to hang with commercial fantasy art, even by early 1990s standards. But I’m kinda charmed by Jadethread from the Forgotten Realms. He looks like Phillip Seymour Hoffman in a heist movie. Why is his mask so large? Was he working a blowtorch as part of the heist? I do like that he appears to be doing a little fist pump here. Way to go, Jadethread. You did it.
These cards don’t credit the artist, which is another knock against them. MtG attributed the artwork on the cards from day one.
What I’m also just now noticing is that some of these cards include the superscript “™” after the character’s name, while others don’t. This is probably just an oversight, but I prefer to think that someone at TSR thought that Jadethread was important IP for D&D’s future, while the Oaktree brothers were yeeted into the 1992 equivalent of Creative Commons.
Jobinov and Thiawskeen
Oh, the pain of unpronounceable fantasy names. It might be… THEE-aw-skeen?
I was going to make fun of Jobinov’s art, but then I turned over the card and saw “Equipment: Lasso.” Jobinov does one thing and he does it well, I have to respect this. I must still question the choice to draw a halfling – a creature etymologically most known for height relative to the height of others – without any point of reference, not even a piece of furniture, just a hazy blue background.
Thiawskeen and Jobinov are the only two Spelljammer cards in this pack, but there is nothing on either card that conveys "this is Spelljammer." That's another failure of this product line; if it is not going to communicate something about each TSR world and get players interested in buying products from those settings, why feature characters from each one?
Dappledref
“[H]e just hates working for a living.” Dappledref sounds like he stepped right out of a Stan Kelly comic.
Wethilion
For some reason, this pack is chock full of high-level rogues with ordinary stats and minimal equipment. The waste of space here is off the charts. Think about how much you could consolidate this and make it more gameable if it went something like this:
Wethilion (CN Gnome Rogue 10)
AC 6 TH 16 MV 6 HP 33
Has 2d4 automatic copters, clockwork animals, and mechanical soldiers nearby at all times; at least one will invariably malfunction, emitting sparks or crashing into the nearest fragile object. Uses Rube Goldberg-style inventions to assassinate his victims. Too smart for his own good, his schemes are unnecessarily complex. Secretly wishes to find the Sherlock Holmes to his Moriarity. Sample assassination schemes: A clock that drips poison into a particularly punctual victim’s tea; an ice sculpture that releases magic or poison as it melts; a clockwork assassin disguised as a statue, built to kill the king who shares its likeness.
The Dark Sun characters are not especially interesting, but their art does, at least, suggest some internal consistency and include details specific to Dark Sun. I don’t think they are by Brom originals (again, no credited artist), but I imagine Brom’s strong visual identity for Dark Sun gave it some implicit (or possibly even explicit) art direction that improved the quality across the board. The content on the back of each card
Next time: How Could TSR Have Made a Better Card-Based Product in 1992?
