One pack ripped from the TCG plugin
A fan-made RuneLite plugin has grown quickly over the last four weeks, and Jagex has now included it in an official survey. The OSRS TCG plugin, along with the “Cardcore” restriction it inspired, is one of twelve options in Jagex’s Quarterly Survey. The wording shows interest, not a commitment to build the mode.
The plugin has produced its own genre of clip. Yeah, you’ve really gotta unlock coins:
How it started
The OSRS TCG plugin (built by Azderi, with card artwork sourced from the OSRS Wiki) released on June 25 and has already reached roughly 69,839 active installs as of July 16. The mechanic is simple: you earn credits from normal gameplay, spend them on booster packs, and collect cards for items and NPCs across the game. Nothing about the base plugin restricts how you play.
The restriction came from the community, not the plugin. Streamers including Faux and Alfie began running “cardlocked” Ironman accounts, unable to interact with an item or NPC until pulling its matching card from a pack, and the format spread fast. Faux, who is bald, pulling the one card he could never get in real life:
Within days, players were publishing formal rulesets for it. One community-written “Extreme Cardlocked Ironman Ruleset,” explicitly inspired by Faux’s account, lays out real constraints: no trading cards, no picking up locked items in advance, no attacking or interacting with locked NPCs at all, foils treated as ordinary unlocks, and packs fixed at their default 2,500 credit cost.
The result is a hardcore-style ruleset created by players and run entirely through a fan plugin that Jagex did not build.
What the survey asks
Jagex’s Quarterly Survey (closing August 2) is described in the survey’s own intro as “the first in a series of regular check-in surveys designed to help us better understand your experiences and priorities.” Buried in the character-types question is this, quoted directly from the live survey:
Cardcore: Items and NPCs are locked behind unlocking their respective cards as part of in-game OSRS trading cards, which are unlocked by progressing your account.
It sits alongside eleven other options, including Region Locked, Bronzeman, Bronzeman-Lite, Hardcore Main, Nightmare, Extreme, Hunted, Barred, and Locked In, in a “select up to 3” multiple-choice question, not a dedicated poll. That distinction matters: this is Jagex measuring general interest across a wide menu of ideas, not putting Cardcore up for a binary yes/no vote. Nothing here commits Jagex to building it.
The survey does confirm that Jagex knows the community built this at scale without prompting. It also shows that the idea is being considered, at least as a possible direction.
The community is not fully on board
Reaction on r/2007scape this week has been mixed. A “TCG Plugin has god packs apparently” post pulled 953 points and 330 comments, while a “Petition to ban TCG plugin posts from this sub” argued that the content “provides absolutely no value for OSRS players who don’t use the plugin.” Another thread said, “Dev time should be for the base game not new modes that can be implemented via plugins.”
Both sides have a point. The plugin is optional and changes nothing about the base game for anyone who ignores it. But an official Cardcore mode, if Jagex ever built one, would be different: server-side game modes get dev time, QA, and long-term support that a community plugin does not, and that is a real tradeoff against every other roadmap item competing for the same hours.
Track this alongside the rest of the market on the full GE table.
Related reading: Grand Exchange Bets: The Risk of Update Speculation covers how to separate a real, data-backed move from hype before it’s already priced in.