I've collected all of the Christmas Sale cards and kept 2 of each of them converting the rest into gems. This weekend all of my collected cards were gone. Were these time limited cards and if yes what were we supposed to do with them in that limited time?
Steam Trading Cards – Where Did the Christmas Sale Cards Go?
steam-trading-cards
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Typically you get one drop about every 15, 30 or 60 minutes of "gameplay" depending on the game.
By gameplay, of course, I mean "have the game running", and by "have the game running" I mean "the border of your avatar changes from blue to green." For example, for Trine 2, idling in the launcher counts as gameplay.
Hot Trine 2 gameplay action
From personal experience, it appears that you can get a drop every ~15 minutes so long as you restart the game after every drop.
Yes, it happens all the time. In fact, because Trading Cards haven't been around for very long, the majority of games that now have them are games that didn't have them at first, either because they came out before the feature was added, or because the cards/backgrounds/etc. weren't ready/planned yet when the game was released.
A note: Since the cards are given based on time played, this doesn't require an update to the game at all. It's mostly a matter of creating the artwork/descriptions/emoticons for it.
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Best Answer
For a couple of years now, since Holiday Sale 2013, the trading cards related to sale events have been only temporary. In fact 2013's Steam Summer Getaway cards are the only ones that didn't expire. (Although badges and items obtained from them would be permanent.) After expiring, the cards would disappear from all inventories.
The Holiday Sale 2015 card set expired on Jan 4th 2016.
As seen in the image above (provided by Little Helper), if you looked at the cards in your Inventory screen, there would be a note in red stating that the cards would expire at specific date and time. And I belive the time is localized as well, so it will be accurate to your local time.