Did You Know Steam’s Trading Cards Have Cool Wallpapers?

Are you familiar with Steam’s trading cards? It’s a neat little system where, when you play a certain amount of the many games in your Steam library that support this feature, you’re rewarded with these digital cards based on the game. They have a little picture of whatever they’re supposed to represent and, if you’re lucky, a fun description to go with them. They can be used to craft badges for those same titles that then reward you with wallpapers and emoticons or sold for small amounts of very real money to other players on the Steam Marketplace, though they mostly just clog up my inventory and get looked at from time to time, at least in my case.

However, recently I learned from a friend that these simple trading cards actually feature more art than they appear to at first glance. If you go into your Library and select a game that supports trading cards, you can click on those cards and Steam will bring up a new window featuring a landscape version of that image that’s perfect for desktop wallpaper. Only, it’s not just a blown-up picture, but an expanded one that usually offers more details than the thumbnail. Sometimes, the thumbnail only showed a small piece of a larger, more interesting image, and other times, the blown-up picture 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 that you’ve got there too. Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be any way to do this from the Inventory, 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 big pieces of art. However, what’s even better is that you can keep bringing these landscape images up even after you’ve crafted a badge. Sadly, if you merely sell the card, you lose the picture, but that’s okay.

Since this appears to be the case for every single card I own, I assume this feature of the trading cards has been around from the beginning, or at least pretty close to that. However, I’ve never heard of this being a feature in Steam. Perhaps I’m just living under a rock, but the people I’ve brought this up with also didn’t know about it and even the friend who introduced me to this had only learned of it recently herself.

Vampire Survivors

Still, since it appears to be such an old feature, I imagine many readers will already know about this and might find it quaint that I’m only hearing about this now (after I’ve sold many of my cards…), but stuff like this can be very easy to miss, even when it seems to be right there in your face to some people.

In any case, while this is very cool and is going to keep me from selling a lot of cards that I might have otherwise, the main thing I’ve learned here is that there are two ways to make a Steam trading card super cool: fun descriptions and fun “secret” art. The main thing I’ve gotten, though, is a very cool new wallpaper for my desktop.

BlazBlue: Chronophantasma Extend