What do you do when you have the hottest tabletop war gaming intellectual property in 2001? Why, you make a collectable trading card set for use with said war game of course. Combine all of the tricks of chase cards with the card rarity factor of a collector card game, like Magic the Gathering, and you will be printing money right? Right???
Turns out no you won’t. But what you will do is make a collectable card set that, 20 years on, is still somewhat useful to the players of the game and visually inspiring.
Packs and boxes of the the cards are still available for about twice what they cost when originally released, when adjusted for inflation. Generally packs and boxes can be located on E-bay or other second hand sites. As with any collector cards set, the specialty chase cards are often listed for unreasonable prices. However, the chase cards are not what makes this card set useful or interesting.
The regular cards are designed to assist in the building of an army for the first edition Mage Knight table top war game. They have stats for the three quality levels of the unit, points costs, game lore, and game play tips, and a photo for that unit, all on the back of the card.
The front of the card has a stylized illustration of the unit, along with the name and faction to which that unit belongs. Really it is the art work on the front of the cards that is the interesting part. The artwork is sharp and inspiring for young would be artists to emulate. The bold lines and and bright colors are very attractive with just enough detail and variation. When Upper Deck printed these cards they used high quality cardstock and ink. These cards are still striking to look at and have maintained their crisp colors even after 20 years.
The unfortunate part of these cards, and in my opinion a large part of why they failed to have a lasting impact, is that “rarity” aspect previously mentioned. Rather than make only the flashy chase cards, signature cards, and prize card use the rarity algorithm, WizKids elected to use it for the unit cards as well.
With that action WizKids ensured that if a player didn’t have the rare card for their army, they would not be able to use the cards as advertised. The tool of army building was broken from the beginning, by design. Once people figured this out they stopped buying the cards. No sets were produced after the initial print run.
Purchase of a box would grant 2 random miniatures, but no guarantee that the cards for them would be in the box. I have only ever seen the card and miniature for one of these, Slurshem (Zombie). Though there were supposedly 3 different miniatures in the rotation.
The release included various types of chase cards. The prize winning redemption card would supply a free unique miniature if the card was returned to WizKids by a certain date. The dragon chromium cards, of which there were only 2, red and black, were lore cards with a generic game strategy tip on the back. The Melee cards were lore exclusive with no game related tips or rules.
The final chase cards were the Signature Series, that highlighted the artists for Mage knight. Each card was limited to 500 prints for each artist. These were supposed to be the pinnacle of the series of cards, hand signed by the artists that created the card series. This is kind of a cool keep sake for collectors of nostalgia. The prices for these cards are wildly inconsistent.
Unfortunately, due to the poor decision to make the army builder tool dependent on the rarity factor, the cards failed to make their mark. Now a couple decades later the art work still holds up, even if the game has not.
I discovered these cards in passing while using the Mage Knight miniatures for my HeroQuest game. I find them to be quite inspirational. Because of that inspiration I found all of the regular cards, and built a Mage Knight Collector Card Visual Reference, which can be downloaded from here. This file has images of the front and back of all the Mage Knight Collector cards from the 2001 series release.
There are a some notable omissions. First is DR2 The Great Fire Dragon, the back of the card is not in the reference. I was not able to get the card, or image, for less that $150 USD and I felt that I didn’t really want it that badly. The Signature Series cards were excessive to purchase and they have not been included.
– Dru
Dru's Den of Ill Repute 