Buying DND spell cards: Are they worth the money?

I am just going to lay it out straight: I wasted my damn money. Wasted it. The idea is great, don’t get me wrong. The execution, for my personal table, turned out to be a trainwreck, and I want to tell you exactly how I got there before you go buy a stack of these things.

I play a lot of D&D, mostly as a player, and I was getting sick of one thing: combat speed. Or, more accurately, the lack of it. Every single round, my buddy, bless his heart, would spend a minute and a half flipping through the Player’s Handbook just to find the exact wording for Cure Wounds. Every time. Meanwhile, the DM is tapping his pen, the pizza is getting cold, and I’m just staring at the ceiling, thinking, “Jesus, we are just Level 3. What is this going to look like at Level 10?”

So, I started researching solutions. The internet kept screaming about these official spell cards. They looked tidy. They looked robust. They looked like they’d cut the time down to a tenth of what it was. I pulled the trigger on a set—the Arcane set first, because that’s what my friend needed most. It cost me a decent chunk of cash, but I justified it as an investment in fun.

The first weekend after they arrived, I unboxed the package like it was a sacred relic. Nice sturdy box. The cards felt thick. I immediately sorted the stack for my friend’s character. He only knew eight spells. I shoved those eight cards into a small baggie and handed them over, grinning like I’d solved the Middle East conflict. “No excuses now, buddy,” I told him.

The first session we played, I watched him use them. The initial results were promising. Combat started. “Cure Wounds? Oh, here it is,” he said, reading it immediately from the card. Nice. Speed increased. I felt like a genius.

Then, the problems started creeping in. Just like when Bilibili tried to use Go for everything and ended up with a mess of Scala, Java, and C++, I found that the simple solution actually created a hodgepodge of problems in practice.

First, my friend decided to multiclass. He needed a few Cleric spells now. The Arcane set didn’t cover those, obviously. I forked out the cash again for the Cleric set. Now, he had two mini-decks. My other friend, who’d been using a Bard, saw the perceived success and wanted his own. I bought the Bard set. Then my girlfriend started playing a Druid. Another set. Before I knew it, I had four huge boxes of cards on my shelf, and we were only using about 20% of the cards across all four boxes. It’s a mess to maintain.

The system forces you to buy entire sets, full of Level 8 spells you won’t use for a year, just to get the three Level 1 spells your new character needs. We ended up with three massive stacks of completely redundant cards. It’s an insane waste of material and money.

Here’s where the whole thing really collapsed:

• The cards don’t have enough space for errata or house rules. If we change something slightly, I have to use a Sharpie on the card, which looks like crap.
• We lost cards quickly. They’re shuffled, dropped on the floor, left under pizza boxes. Trying to find one specific card in the main box is a nightmare.
• They don’t always cover everything. When a spell involves an obscure rule from a different book (like material components that double as an arcane focus), you still had to crack open the PHB for clarity. They felt more like a reminder than a true source.

I realized I was spending $15 to $20 for every 10 essential cards I actually needed, and getting 50 irrelevant ones shoved down my throat. It was the same problem as the companies that end up with N small, chaotic development teams because one language couldn’t cover the whole scope. Here, one set of cards couldn’t cover the whole character, so I had to buy four whole systems just to cherry-pick a handful of spells.

I finally gave up. About a month ago, I dragged out a stack of 3×5 index cards and a pack of colored pens. I had my friend sit down and literally write down his key spells, one per card, using the PHB. It took him 30 minutes, and the result?

It was faster and better.

He wrote exactly what he needed. He added our house rule component on the back of the card. He tailored the language to his specific character’s stats. And when he ran out of the original index cards, I went down to the dollar store and bought a new pack for $1. Total cost for a completely customized, low-maintenance, easy-to-replace spell system: next to nothing.

The official cards? They’re now shoved into a storage bin, mostly unused. Are they worth the money? If you play an absolutely vanilla, single-class character with just the core PHB spells and never go past Level 3, maybe. For everyone else? No hell way. Just grab an index card pack, get writing, and save yourself the cash and the headache of maintaining a chaotic tower of plastic.