The CardMan Mode Pet Peeves: What's Bugging the Community Right Now
The card system's biggest gripes right now: gilded-spade taunts, dog foils, the endless Guard argument, cheated highscores, trap cards you can't use, and prestige pulls you can't touch for 1,000 hours.
By OSRS Card Exchange Team · · 7 min read
CardMan Mode is a couple of weeks old, wildly fun, and — like anything the community actually loves — a giant list of things people can't stop complaining about. None of this is a demand for change; half of it is affectionate. But if you've played the mode, you've felt at least six of these. Here are the card system's current pet peeves.
1. The wrong-variant taunt cards
Nothing hurts like a card that is almost the one you needed. Woodcutting is gated on owning any usable axe, so the pack generator's favourite prank is handing you the one axe you can't touch: "I have rune axe... might as well be gilded." The Gilded spade works for clue digs but not for farming or X Marks the Spot, so it unlocks essentially nothing you wanted. And the Gilded pickaxe shows up in bulk while the plain steel refuses to: "Pulled 2 gilded pickaxes before pulling a steel after like 200 packs."
632 packs, not a singular axe. Have a gilded but wtfff.
Resource • Weapon • General • Clue
Oh, I'm a gold digger?
Resource • Weapon • General • Clue
Used for mining and very stylish.
Resource • Weapon
A powerful axe.
2. "Dog foils": most foils unlock nothing
The dream is a foil that unlocks a whole family of gear. The reality, by the community's own count, is that most foils do nothing at all. Reported hit rates hover around 1 in 20 foils actually granting anything usable — the rest join the hall of shame: foil cooked chicken, foil newspaper, foil santa hat, foil cat training medal. People literally keep score of their duds.
That's 7 completely useless foils for me. — I raise you with 8.
Resource
A collection of written news on paper!
Resource • Consumable
Mmm this looks tasty.
Resource • Armour
For feline training expertise.
3. The foil argument that will never, ever end
When a foil does matter, the community immediately starts fighting about what it should unlock. Foil twisted bow — all bows below it, CoX uniques, special bows only, or nothing? Foil elemental runes — does water unlock air, or has elemental weakness killed the old ladder? The rune-hierarchy wars alone have spawned dozens of contradictory rulings, and the meta-complaint is that it's all vibes: "Foil rules in general are sus because of how subjective they are." There's even an emerging etiquette — stop announcing your foil unlocks in the main chat — precisely because the argument dominates everything.
Holy **** is the foil argument still happening.
4. "There are no rules" — and everyone means it differently
The mode's deepest pet peeve is that the mode isn't defined. Faux's videos are the de-facto rulebook, but "play how you want" is the accepted escape valve — which means every table has its own house rules, and any disagreement dead-ends at "it's a made-up gamemode." Half the community wants a defined ruleset so highscores and bragging rights actually mean something; the other half thinks defining it would ruin the fun.
Everyone is making decisions based on vibes and arbitrary rules. You can't have a gamemode set on that.
There is no default, it's a made-up gamemode lol.
5. The Guard/Children of the Sun stalemate
The single most-litigated ruling in the mode, and it's still not settled. Children of the Sun asks you to mark guards — is marking an interaction (so you need the Guard card) or is it more like talking (free)? Because the quest opens all of Varlamore, the answer decides a huge chunk of progression. The community's own estimates have drifted from a hard 50/50 toward 70/30 and even 90/10 against needing the card — but the Bronzeman plugin still lists the guard as required, so rule-followers sit and wait while everyone else strolls into Varlamore.
I waited for the card because the plugin said so.
6. The highscores are "cheated like mad"
Ask about the leaderboards and you'll get a groan. Fully-maxed accounts appear out of nowhere from forgotten plugin profiles and alts; a 6,376-card, all-foil account is widely blamed on cranked pack multipliers ("set it to 1000x and ripped for hours"); and because sellers, traders, foil-users and no-foil pures are all ranked on one board, nobody agrees what a rank even measures.
Yo, what are these maxed accounts entering the highscores doing lol.
7. Trap cards: you own it, you still can't use it
- Mystery box — the box itself is a card, so a box you earned somewhere else goes straight to the bank forever. "Welcome to the mystery box in the bank club."
- Old school bond — bonds are a card too. You can pay real money and still not be allowed to redeem it. Suggested fix: "restart account."
- Lamp — every genie and quest lamp you get sits in your inventory awaiting the one Lamp card. Side effect: "genies are terrifying on this mode."
- Coin pouches — no Coins card means you destroy every pouch you pickpocket. One player reports binning "like 350k in coin pouches thus far."
8. Bloat cards clogging the packs
6,376 cards sounds great until a chunk of them are holiday, league and DMM items that unlock nothing in a normal account. Pulling Bank filler, a stale baguette or a soul shard as your shiny reward for 2,500 credits gets old fast, and the community has been vocal about wanting the catalogue trimmed before any full launch.
Man, I hope all the useless cards get removed, it's so annoying.
9. "You can't trust that part of the plugin"
The Bronzeman TCG plugin does the heavy lifting, but its quest-requirement lists have gaps that burn people: it told players they only needed coins for Current Affairs (you also need a tiny net), it's missing berries for Romeo & Juliet, several runecrafting talismans, and it ignores prerequisite quests entirely. The dev is actively fixing these — mid-week it caught up and started tracking Pot of flour — but until then the standing advice is to double-check every quest gate yourself.
The plugin ain't perfect on the quest reqs. He's working on it.
10. Some skills are just locked out for ages
A few skills need such a specific stack of cards that you can be halfway through the whole catalogue and still level 1. Herblore is the poster child: you need the grimy/clean herb and an unfinished-potion path and the secondary ingredient, so a lone foil herb unlocks nothing. Prayer at base rates is 2,600 hours to 99. And Fishing, Mining, Magic and Ranged all hard-stop at level 1 until one very specific tool or rune card shows up.
3,000 unique cards unlocked, 47%! — and still level 1 Herblore.
11. Prestige pulls with a 1,000-hour fuse (and the pets that unlock nothing)
Pulling a Twisted bow or an Elysian spirit shield at combat level 30 is the mode's signature bittersweet moment — a trophy you can't use for a thousand hours. "Ely unlocked! I'm off to corp with my steel sword!" And pets flipped from the ultimate flex to a dead pack slot that unlocks nothing, so the standard move is now to sell them for progression — a genuinely funny inversion that still stings on the pull.
The fact that pets are a bad thing now is so funny.
The takeaway
Here's the thing about this list: almost none of it is a reason to stop playing. The gilded-spade taunts, the dog foils, the endless Guard debate — they're the texture of the mode, the stuff that fills clan chat and makes every pull a story. The real pain points are the fixable ones: a card catalogue that could lose its dead weight, quest-requirement lists still being filled in, and highscores that need guardrails. We're building the site side of that with the community, out loud.
Add your own pet peeve on the forums
Disagree with the ranking, or got one we missed? The community forums are where the rulings get argued out.
Frequently asked
- What is the most common complaint about CardMan Mode's card system?
- The most common gripes are wrong-variant 'taunt' cards (like a gilded spade or an unusable rune axe when you need a plain one), foils that unlock nothing, and the fact that the ruleset is undefined so every group plays slightly differently. These are community observations about a third-party plugin's catalogue, not official rules.
- Do most foil cards actually unlock anything?
- No. By the community's own count, only around 1 in 20 foils grant something usable. The rest are 'dog foils' — foil cooked chicken, foil newspaper, foil cat training medal and so on — that unlock nothing. When a foil does matter, the community argues at length about exactly what it should unlock, which is itself a running frustration.
- Why are the CardMan Mode highscores considered unreliable?
- Players point to maxed accounts appearing from forgotten plugin profiles and alts, all-foil collections attributed to cranked pack multipliers, and the fact that sellers, traders and no-foil 'pures' are ranked on one board despite playing by different rules. The site runs an over-level filter, a review queue and per-IP abuse limits to push back on the worst of it.
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