Question about Steam Trading cards

[Philippe]

A while back I discovered that I had an inventory of Steam trading cards and wasn't sure what to do with them.

After a little coaching from the members of this forum I managed to sell them all off, and actually had fun doing it.  I kept pulling cards that hadn't sold off the market every few days, and then would put them back on the market at the current market price.  I managed to get everything sold, and it didn't take all that long to do it.

I was actually thinking of how I might have more fun with the system, like wearing my technical trader's hat and adjusting my selling prices to the direction of the trend in sales prices on a particular item.  But my original plan was just to get everything cleared out, and I accomplished that.  (I'm now the proud owner of most of the content of Rise of Flight, and hope to pick the rest up next time it goes on sale).

But there's a problem.

Since running my trading card inventory down to zero, there have been no new additions to the inventory.

Now I never used to pay any attention to things like this, but now that I've figured out something I can do with trading cards I kind of miss having cards I need to sell.  That doesn't mean I would go so far as to buy some in an attempt to trade them (from what I could see it would be almost impossible to make money at that), but it seems odd that no cards have shown up in my account since I sold the last one.

Is there something going on that I should be aware of, or am I doing (or not doing -- like buying games) that effects this? 

[steve58]

You usually get them when you play your games, but not all games will give you cards.  Seems like I get most of mine when I first buy a game and then play it.  I always end up with a card or two and then it seems to stop (probably because I move on to another game :P). 

Is there a limit to how many trading cards can drop?

Most games will drop a number of cards equal to about half the number of cards in that game's set of cards. For example, Half-Life 2 has 8 cards in its set, you can receive 4 card drops by playing it. You'll need to collect the other half of the set from other community members. Try the beta group discussions, community market, barter with friends, and trade discussions. You can check how many drops you have remaining on your badges page.

http://steamcommunity.com/tradingcards/faq/

[Pete Dero]

I think they mostly show up during the big sale periods.

[Coiler]

Also, trading cards now only start dropping after two hours of play since Valve launched their "two hours or two weeks" return policy. There's obvious self-interest involved, but there was also a lot of abusing the system with people getting a game, getting the cards, and then returning the game.