What’s With the Fly? A Pre-Release Look at the New D&D Reference Cards

I prefer running tables in analog as much as possible, but generally run a hybrid of digital and analog.

I totally use D&D Beyond as the Dungeon Master and never begrudge my players who use the app to keep the character sheet nearby. No digital shaming at my table!

That said, I do love tangible items at the table. Heroic inspiration as metal coins, spell slots as glass beads and a hoard of physical dice just offer a joy that the digital ephemera can’t quite match.

This is the reason I picked up the new Wizards of the Coast reference cards the moment I had the chance to get them early.

I have history here. For years I have run off the old 5.0 Spellbook Cards from Gale Force Nine, the laminated decks with art on one face and the stat block on the other. They have been to a lot of sessions. So when Wizards brought the whole line in-house for the 2024 rules, I wanted to see for myself whether the new cards were a real upgrade or just a fresh coat of paint.

Here is what I found.

What’s in the box?

Eight decks are available. Three spell decks split by level (Levels 0-5), two magic item decks split by rarity (common, uncommon, rare and very rare), and three monster decks split by category (marketing categories, not actual creature types).

The spell decks run about twenty dollars each, and the item and monster decks run about twenty-five. They released early in August and hit wide release later that month. Everything is built for the 2024 rulebooks.

The font, finally

The first thing I noticed had nothing to do with art or organization. It was the font size. The Gale Force Nine cards crammed everything onto one card face, and the type ran somewhere around seven or eight point. Hard to read in good light, genuinely difficult across a dim table.

The new cards feel like a ten point minimum. I can read them at arm’s length without leaning in and squinting mid-combat. That sounds like a small thing until you have lost the flow of an encounter because you could not parse a stat block fast enough.

This alone changes how the cards feel in the hand.

The spell cards also color code by school of magic, which is a nice touch for sorting and for quick visual grab at the table.

The one thing they dropped

The old Gale Force Nine cards listed a book and page reference on each card. Dungeon Master’s Guide, page whatever. That was useful. If a card left you with a question, you knew exactly where to go for the full ruling.

The new cards drop the page references entirely. On paper that is a downgrade. But I think it is a bet more than a loss. The idea is that if the card is a complete, standalone reference, you should not need to flip back to the book at all. The bigger, more legible cards have room to be self-contained in a way the old ones never did, so they earn the right to stand alone.

Whether that bet pays off is the one thing I cannot tell you yet. I will not really know until I have run with them for a while and hit the edge cases. But I will say the thing that always bothered me about the old cards was the font, and that is fixed.

The art, and who made it

The monster cards are beautiful. Each one gives a full double-card face over to art, and the creatures look the way they should look. That matters to me more than it might to some folks, because Ozark Dice and Destiny commissions its own art and we are moving toward as much licensed, human-made art as we possibly can.

So when I say the art here is good, I am saying it as someone who appreciates the real thing.

And here is the part I want to pause for a moment. Wizards credits the artists by name on the cards. In this moment, with so much anxiety about AI and authorship swirling around the hobby, putting a human name on the work is a statement. It says a person made this. I love that, and I think it is the right call.

The spell art, by contrast, is forgettable when it is there at all. That tells you where the effort went, and honestly I do not mind. Nobody shows off a spell card to admire it. The monsters and magic items are where the beauty belongs.

How they come sorted, and how I actually use them

I am an A to Z person. My ideal is a complete set with a clean alphabetical index across all three categories, so I can find anything by name in a second.

The decks do not arrive that way. They go three different directions. The monsters are grouped into thematic categories, Animals and NPCs, Mystical and Menacing, and Fearsome and Ferocious. The magic items sort by rarity tier, common up through very rare, with no artifacts. The spells sort by level.

Each of those makes sense for browsing or for shopping a deck off a shelf. None of them is how I want to find a card in the middle of a fight, when a player says a spell name and I need it now.

So here is my system. Everything goes into three-ring binders in baseball card sleeves or double card sleeves, organized A to Z. That is the archive, the master library.

Then for a given session I make a pull, a smaller collection of just what I expect to need. If you run West Marches like I do, this will feel familiar. You are already pulling for the region the party is heading into, so pulling the cards to match is a natural extension of prep you are doing anyway.

At the table itself, the cards beat flipping the Monster Manual. I will still flip the book when I need to, but having the stat block in a card is faster and less disruptive.

My Loreweaver DM screen (Shout out to indie RPG maker, Emberglow) has magnets, so I can pop a monster card onto the back of the screen and keep the stats and the art right in my sightline without breaking the scene.

That is the kind of thing a physical card does that a laptop screen and a PDF simply cannot.

The catch with the monster cards

There is one real downside to that beautiful monster art. The name of the monster is printed right there on the art side. So if you prop it up or leave it face up, you are leaking “out of character” information. Your players can read the name.

The very thing that makes the card gorgeous and quick to reference is the thing that can spoil a reveal. Nothing a careful DM cannot work around, but you should know it going in.

And then there is the fly

I have to tell you about the fly. In my magic item deck, tucked in among the items, I found a random giant fly. A playing-card-sized monster that, as far as I can tell, does not even appear in the monster deck. A creature card, in the item deck, with no obvious reason to be there.

I keep going back and forth on it. Is it a misprint, a stray card that wandered in during packing?

Or is it an intentional little Easter egg, a fly in the ointment, a wink from somebody at Wizards? I honestly do not know, and I kind of love not knowing. If you pick up a set and find your own oddity, or if you know the story behind the fly, tell me. I want to hear it.

Early verdict

I am not ready to render a full judgment, because the one open question, whether these stand on their own without the page references, only answers itself after real table time. But the first impressions are strong.

The legibility problem that dogged the old cards is solved, the monster art is worth having in your sightline, and the artist credits are the kind of thing I am glad to support with my dollars.

I will report back once they have logged some sessions. In the meantime, I have a fly to catch.