What is Stormlight Lost Tales Story Deck
Many of you may have heard about the Dragonsteel Nexus 2024 craze surrounding the Stormlight Lost Tales trading card story, but what even is that? Notice: I won’t be spoiling the full art or stories for any of the series. Gotta collect em’ all!
‘Stormlight Lost Tales Story Deck, the world’s first trading card story’ is a mouth full, so I’ll just refer to it as “Lost Tales” from here on out.
The basics
Lost Tales is a series of collectable trading cards featuring art and untold stories from the Stormlight Archive. With the set released at Dragonsteel Nexus 2024, there are three stories and a set of cards featuring Heralds.
Each booster pack contains 15 cards: 13 story cards, 1 foil story card, and one that is either a Herald, foil, or nonsense card.
On each of the story cards, there is a section of a story on one side, and a piece of art on the other. Each story has a total of 54 standard cards, with groups of 9 (1-9, 10-18, etc) forming a larger image.
For the Herald cards, each depicts a herald on one side, with another mosaic image on the back.
Each card also has a holographic edition, similar to what you would expect in other series.
Some cards have “nonsense” versions, which are stamped with a “100% pure nonsense” mark, and contain jokes not canonical to the story.
Release at Dragonsteel Nexus 2024
Lost Tales was the conference-wide game to play at Nexus 2024. Each attendee received a World Hopper Passport, filled to the brim with pages needing to be stamped at various activities around the conference, and two free packs of Lost Tales cards.
To earn stamps, attendees would need to watch sessions in the various conference rooms, visit specific booths in the exhibit hall, and complete a rather intricate scavenger hunt / series of logic puzzles. Some pages required as many as four stamps to be complete, with only or two being required for the Lost Tales game, while others only required a single stamp.
Some Dragonsteel employees were designated as Ghostbloods, with secret stamps required to fill out your book. If you completed all the open spots in your passport, you would earn a Pin, but I wasn't able to confirm this.
As you complete pages, you could visit the Silverlight Mercantile booth to get new packs, up to 14 additional packs, meaning you got 16 in total.
Additionally, you could trade extra cards back to Silverlight Mercantile to fill missing spots in your collection, but had to trade like cards for like cards, i.e. Heralds for Heralds, or holos for holos.
In the Dragonsteel store, there was a binder on sale set up to fit the entire collection. The exterior quality was great, but mine had some odd binding issues. I will likely find a different way to display my cards at a later date.
Reception
People. Went. Crazy.
Lost Tales was the talk of the entire convention. Everyone was on the hunt for stamps, and getting into Silverlight became a waiting game. On Saturday morning I waited in line for an hour and a half just to get in.
Lunch tables were packed with folks trading cards, making swaps, and bartering for the most rare cards.
For the most part, getting your story card sets completed took some work, but was doable. Some of the higher sequenced numbers (50+) were rare, but you could usually find someone with spares to trade.
Heralds on the other hand, were much more difficult to find. I pulled a total of 7 Heralds across my 16 packs. One of them was a duplicate of a holo Herald I pulled, and another was a straight duplicate. I ended up collecting only 5 unique Heralds, trading one away for a bunch of story cards.
The nonsense cards were the most derisive ones to collect. Some folks didn’t care too much about them (myself included) but others were hot to collect the full set. The hard part was that no one was really sure just how many nonsense cards there actually were. Some “duplicate” numbered nonsense cards would have subtly different text, others would be the same.
By Saturday afternoon, many of us were freely giving away our extras. I was the deliverer and benefactor of many freely given cards, and the joy that it brought people was what makes this fandom great.
Future release
It was mentioned during a panel that Lost Tales would be released soon. I heard as early as January, but also heard that it could be January. This is confirmed on Dragonsteel’s website.
Are the stories cannon?
Yes. There is a story with Lopen and Elokar, as well as one about Jasnah post Wind’s Pleasure. The third story is called “Chasm Friends” and is non canonical.
Is it worth it?
If you are a collector and want some really cool art, absolutely. It’s not a game, and I think the drive to collect / trade will die out post Dragonsteel, but it's still a cool, canonical part of the Stormlight Archive that will be out there for you to check out.