Here’s something weird. Not content to leave money on the table, TSR elbowed their way into the collectible trading card market in 1991 with a 750-card set of D&D-themed cards. The original run was successful enough to see new sets hit the market in 1992 and 1993.

These are the factory sets from 1991 and 1992. They contain the entire runs of the the annual sets that you could have collected by buying a million random packs. The key distinction is the foil – the factory set cards have silver highlights, the cards from the random packs have gold. There were also cards with red foil, which I guess were super rare or something.

The cards themselves are kind of dumb (what on earth is up with that tarrasque??). Each card depicts a magic item, place, monster or character, with an abbreviated stat block on the back. Much of the art is repurposed from other D&D products. The original art was…hastily rendered, if we’re being charitable. Funny thing: a lot of the cards use art of an obviously identifiable character, like Red Sonja here, but then give them made up names and stats.

This whole thing reeks of a desire to part kids from their money. But there is still something cool about a gigantic set of reference cards. This obviously isn’t the way to go about it, but the trading cards, I think, laid the ground work for the decks of magic items, spells and random encounters that started to appear in 1993, which I think were generally useful. It also paved the way for the Spellfire collectible card game in 1994.