This is the kind of product that has you kicking yourself and wishing you'd thought of it first... that said, whilst it is useful it could have been so much better!

In any game with combat spellcasting, you either need the memory of a wizard or spend ages thumbing through books to find what you need to roll and what the results are each time you want to cast a spell. Ready-reference cards are an obvious solution (ever since I spent ages transcribing Dungeons & Dragons 1e spells onto 5x3 index cards), and if it's the numbers that give you trouble, these ones fit the bill.

Each one is very simple: name of spell, a brief phrase that describes what it does, and four boxes that tell you type of spell, its range, duration and drain. Combat spells have a fifth box to show the damage you do as well. They are colour-coded: orange for combat, blue for detection, red for healing and so on; which makes it easy to look for a spell of the suitable type - but could let others meta-game by seeing what you are about to do.

What's missing is anything descriptive. You will have to remember that, or go look it up - at least each card has the page number for where that spell appears in the core rule book. The other thing that is missing is an image for the card backs, if you are using the PDF version. Most people like their self-printed cards to look good as well as serving a purpose.

Neat idea, but there's the nagging feeling that it could have been done better... and prettier.

As a convention GM for many years I am always looking for ways to make Shadowrun more new player friendly. Spell cards are one such way. I was very excited when I heard Catalyst was going to be releasing these and bought a copy of the PDF so that I could utilize them at the next convention I work.

This set comes with 54 cards and there are 84 spells in the core rulebook. The cards are clearly laid out with all the information you need to cast them. This includes color coding based on type of spell. They do not provide any help on how to resolve them though, that is left to the GM's memory or the handy page numbers listed on the cards.

The cards are an excellent player aid featuring most of the spells which are likely to be needed during combat time. It includes 14 out of 18 combat spells with the missing 4 being those I see least often on player made characters. There are 12 out of 18 Detection spells, but most of the missing spells are simply the extended versions of other spells making the cards easy to modify to reflect that. The 3, out of 11, health spells which are missing are ones I have never seen used. Eight of the 19 Illusion spells are missing, but again it was primarily area effect spells which were left out. Lastly half of the 18 manipulation spells are missing. In addition to leaving out the area spells they also left out the popular "Magic Fingers" and "Fling" spells. Overall they did a decent job of selecting which spells were included in this set of cards. My biggest complaint on selection is that they left out spells which the sample characters in the core rulebook have.

As for the cards themselves, I appreciate the color coding, but for a PDF release I would have preferred if they used plain white backgrounds with color highlights instead colored backgrounds to conserve ink. I would also have liked a "back side" for the cards to make them more like real cards. Lastly I am unsure how I feel about it being 1 card to a page. It lets me pick and choose which cards to print, but it makes it that much harder to print (and cut) a full set at home. To those who are reading this and printing at home, print 3 rows of 2 cards per page and you will get playing card sized cards.

For the player who wants a quick reference, these are a worthwhile purchase. They are also useful for the GM who doesn't want, or have the time, to properly explain all the spells to their players, and since its a PDF a GM can easily print out what each player needs. If either of those describe you, then I recommend buying the spell cards. 3/5 stars.

I’m a big fan of cards at the gaming table. As ready-reference items, they are also very transferable and require little book-keeping. I make extensive use of the Paizo magic item decks at my D&D table, and have been casting about for a similar solution for SR5. So, for USD5.99, what do you get?

The file contains fifty-four single-sided cards, colour-coded to the spell type (Combat, Manipulation, Illusion, etc). Each card has the information for the Spell Type, Range, Damage, Duration, and Drain, with a handy page number reference to look up the spell. There is also a very short flavour-text type description of each spell.

The only improvement I would suggest is to make the cards double-sided and include more rules information on the flipside. Many spells have nuanced information such as increasing effect by number of successes and this would be useful. To be honest, I’d want these cards to be a replacement for the Magic section of the core rulebook – becoming quickplay reference. At the moment they aren’t quite up to the job.

I’ve tried printing them out in both colour and black-and-white and they have rendered well in both formats (although I like the colour better). I would advise anyone purchasing this product to invest in either some decent cardstock for printing, or become friends with someone who owns a laminator. Either way, you want to extend the life of the printed cards, and the heavier cardstock/laminated options make them feel like better than flimsy paper.

They are a nice product, and I would like to check out further decks for equipment, drones and even vehicles, common NPCs, and paracritters. I could imagine that by investing a range of decks, a GM could easily construct ad hoc encounters by laying out some cards behind the screen. If the NPC and paracritter cards came with Damage Tracks, you could laminate them and use a dry-erase marker to keep wounds. I like this direction, and I’ll be most interested to see where it goes.