Making money from Steam Trading Cards: A Comprehensive Guide

If you’ve ever wanted to make money from nothing, Steam Trading Cards may be the magic ticket to put a little extra cash in your wallet while you’re doing something you’d do anyway: playing games. As you spend time in certain games, Steam drops trading cards, which are essentially digital pictures and individually serve no purpose, into your inventory. But what’s the point of collecting these cards? Well, a full set can be crafted into a badge, but the challenge is collecting all the cards in a set. Only half of the cards available for any game are obtainable by playing, so to complete a collection, the player must find someone willing to give, trade, or sell the cards they’re missing. This dynamic has birthed a thriving market where digital cards with no monetary value are bought and sold with real-world money.

-- Work in Progress --

Please note this guide is not in a final state, I am less than 20% done with this guide but in its current state, it is still benefitial and can start you on your marketplace journey but alot of content is missing, hell I havent even put one screenshot in the guide yet. This guide will expand and go very indepth into the marketplace and how to make the most profit, consider adding this to your bookmarks and checkback to see if I have had time to add other ways to make money with steam to the guide over the next week or two.

To-Do:

• Screenshots and images
  
• Add further detail to trading card sections
  
• Video guide (maybe)
  
• Add sections on CD-Keys, Giveaways and Shovelware
  
• Add section on steam marketplace vanity items
  
• Add more sections on making money duh
  
• Add FAQ
  
• Implement feedback

Learning to Walk: The Basics

Making money from cards is simple: Get cards, sell them on the market, and never actually use them to craft anything. The trick is to act fast, because right now, thanks to the Steam sale, the trading card market economy is crashing so fast it makes Greece look healthy in comparison. Get your cards quickly, sell them cheaply, and get out. Don't ever bother waiting for prices to go up, because that isn't going to happen soon.

What's the best way to get cards? What's the best Steam level to reach before trading? How does one get booster packs? Here's a simple breakdown containing the info your need to do some quick 'n dirty Steam profiteering, and hopefully make enough to pick up a free game or two.

Originally posted by Yawnstar:

Please note this guide primarily relies on the support of 3rd party programs and browser extensions as a 'base' on making a profit with trading cards. These programs and extentions are completly legal and highly reputable but I can not take any responsability if anything in this guide causes your account to be suspended or otherwise bad shizzle that shouldn't happen but covering my ass clause because reasons..

Idling

Using the program 'Steam Idol Master', Idling is easily the most efficiant and effective way to farm trading cards with the least effort required, If you own games that are opted into steam trading cards, you can get around three to five cards for each game you own just by tricking steam thinking you are 'playing' that game. You can see which of your games support trading cards, go to the 'Badges' section on Steam for a list. On the top right corner of each game should be a little message saying something like "4 card drops remaining." It's possible to 'play' that game until you get all those cards and the message changes to "No card drops remaining."

The only exception is Free to Play games, which award you drops for spending money in the game. Given that the cards typically go for a few pence, it isn't worth buying items specifically for this reason. But if you've bought stuff before or if you used to own TF2 before it became free then you'll probably have a few drops to spare.

More information on SIM in the next chapter.

Booster Packs

Once you've earned all your regular drops, you become eligible for a Booster Pack. Each pack contains three random cards, including a small chance of finding a 'foil' card, which is worth ten times as much. Booster Packs are awarded at random, you don't even need to play the games to get one, you just have to log into Steam once a week which is always a nice suprise. We will go into further detail about whether booster packs are worth opening or selling as a pack later in the guide.

Buying and Trading

The final way to get cards is the most obvious, you can buy them on the market, or trade them with friends. I tried buying cards cheaply and selling them at a markup, and while you can make money that way I find it simply takes way too much time and effort to be worthwhile. Trading is a better bet, because not all cards are created equal. If your friends care more about making a set than making money, you can trade cheap Team Fortress 2 cards for expensive Trine 2 cards and make a reasonable profit. Just be prepared to lose some friends if they ever find out (like say if you wrote about it on the internet).

Shaking the Money Tree: Using Idle Master to mass-farm cards

Are you one of those people who have a lot of games in your Steam library that have card drops available but you dont enough time to play them or have no interest to? *cough* Bad Rats *cough*

How great would it be to run a program before bed and wake up to an inventory full of Trading Cards you can slap straight onto the marketplace and start earning that steam money? That's what Idle Master does.

The reason why Idle Master is the key of farming and gaining profit is because not only you are not required to download, install or even have a single steam game open for Idle Master to collect any trading cards you can still collect from your game liberay without having to lift a finger.



So, first things first. You'll need to download the app.

1. Download IdleMaster[www.steamidlemaster.com]from the official webpage.
2. Run the app, and click on login and enter your Steam credentials.
3. Run the Steam client.
4. IdleMaster will analyse your Steam Library and Inventory.
5. It will automatically start simulating the gameplay for any game which has card drops remaining, and unlock the cards. You don't even need to download the games at all.
6. The cards will be added to your Steam inventory, and you can sell it on the Steam Community market.

Idle Master is open source and hence safe and secure to use. It even has a Steam community which stands as proof of the app's legitimacy.

From Water to Wine: Mass-auctioning your trading cards using Steam Inventory Helper

If you've been following the guide so far, you should have a fair few trading cards sitting in your inventory just waiting to be turnt into steam wallet cash.

Unfortunatly for people like myself who usually waits until I have 5-6 pages of trading cards in my inventory before I think to sell them, the standard steam interface is just not designed for mass-selling items and is a real pain that each item you go to post on the marketplace needs to have a manually entered sell price slowing down and wasting your time when you just want to always undercut the market. Luckily we have a free chrome extension called 'Steam Inventory Helper' this free browser extension for Google Chrome adds a big amount of new features into the Steam trade-offer system & Steam store functionality.



The extension only works in chrome so if you try to your inventory in your steam client, you are an idiot. Navigate to steamcommunity.com in chrome and log in.

If the extension is installed, you will see newly added buttons and prices below the items in your inventory displaying the average price of that item currently on the steam market.

With this extension it is now possible to mass select and sell all our farmed cards at the markets current price.

[Shit-Show-Commando]

I am wondering, is it possible to have both a buy and sell order on the same card?

[Remar]

Just found this guide and I love it, hopefully you'll update it soon

[Jimmy4609]

but free collectibles aren't the most recommendable way to make money, probably anything with the name TCG or CCG will contain good money on trading

[Jimmy4609]

average is probably around 5 us cents per card, at least in my experience

[RexxReviews]

seems like you end up paying more for the games than what the cards from them are worth.

[n01d]

I've seen cards worth a pretty penny how much of that is all we need to price check?

[Ryan Lee]

Do you think it's possible to earn $100 per month by selling Steam cards?

[Scumstation]

Varies on the cards itself and their value

[Ryan Lee]

What's the average amount of money you could earn for every 100 cards sold? Do you have an approximate value? I'm trying to decide whether it's even worth it or not. Thanks for sharing this guide.

[Pecan]

Amazing. Just wow!!!