Trading Card Aesthetics

I’ve been thinking a lot about the resurgence of trading card aesthetics in NFT art in the last year.. The format has been embraced by emerging artists like terrorism and Evil Biscuit; Beeple released trading cards for his Everydays with NODE; and Objkt published Kento, a series of trading cards featuring digital artists who mint work on their platform. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places, but I haven’t seen much discussion of the history of trading card aesthetics in tokenized art. Some of the earliest collections from 10+ years ago were deliberately styled as trading cards: FDCARD Spells of Genesis, Rare Pepes, Bitcorn, etc. CryptoPunks and CryptoKitties maintained the idea of digital collectibles but got rid of the card aesthetic. They took the data out of the image and put it in the web interface, which continued in the design of OpenSea and other NFT marketplaces. I think it’s interesting that the trading card is returning in this moment when digital art is getting more institutionalized, via museum exhibitions, Art Basel’s Zero10, etc. It feels like an insistence on NFTs as an alternative to the art world. It’s also interesting that both in 2015-16 and 2025-26, there are examples of artists/publishers who are using the trading card format earnestly (Spells of Genesis, Kento, arguably Beeple) and others who are parodying it and/or messing with its formal structure (Rare Pepes, Evil Biscuit). Would love to hear other people’s thoughts on this topic!