“Thornweaver” from artist Emory’s “Elementals” series on NeonMob.com

When I first read about NeonMob I thought it was kind of a strange idea. Buy (or earn) digital-only “trading cards” with art on them – with the ruse that only people with the cards own the art. Once something is digitized, isn’t it pretty much available for (illegal) digital copying and distributing? (Though I guess there are stock photo and vector sites that manage to make a profit and keep things worthwhile for the contributing artists.) And how can you own something that you just look at on a website? It didn’t make much sense.

But… I was bored one day and tried it out. Sign up, and everyday, for free, you get 6 packs of trading cards (which contain 1 or 2 cards, depending on the series). There are dozens of trading card series by different artists. The artists base their packs on a theme, like Monsters or Crazy Landscapes or Imaginary Vampires (the digital art at NeonMob skews towards pop culture-y and comic-y), and many series use a story as a binding agent, a story told through the sequence of trading cards.

And some of the artists (not all, mind you!) are quite good or are contributing interesting series. Like “Walter’s Experiments” by artist “Chaotic Experiments” – an odd story about the various nanotechnology experiments two eccentric scientists perform, and the consequences. Each card illustrates one experiment and is usually a neat math-y fractal-y video clip of some imagined extremecloseup nano molecule or nano bot. Here’s one of the cards from Walter’s experiments that I “own.” It’s “Experiment 90093″, and the accompanying text reads:

Series: S. Type: Shape-Shifting Swarm. Experiment Number: 90093. The purpose of both Series R and Series S was never to utilize the geometric shapes developed in the individual experiments for actual warfare, but to prove that the bots had the ability to do such a thing, if necessary, and to train the bots by teaching them complex shapes. Rare was the battle that would call for the bots to form a diamond, but simply harnessing the ability to do so, as in experiment 90093, endowed them with the power to battle enemy bots at any time, and in any place.

Here’s another, one of my favorites from the series “Abstract Landscapes” by David Zobel: “Ruins in the Fall”

As with physical trading card-collecting, the packs are blind, so you don’t know what you are getting. You get the occasional extra freebie card in a pack and you often get duplicates of cards you already have. Some of cards are “rarer” than others, and some are chase cards (variants). There’s an easy-to-use trading system to find people who have cards you want and offer them a trade for your duplicates. On the downside, because there’s a set limit for how many free packs are given out for each series, you may wind up with, say, 80% of a series found, and no way to get more via freebie packs. This is where NeonMob hopes you will splurge (it actually is quite inexpensive) to purchase more blind packs of a series. This is how the artists get paid. But you can also trade for these, and I’ve done this fairly successfully for one closed-to-freebies series. But I’m no longer ruling out the possibility that I may one day purchase some extra trading card packs for five bucks, or even order a poster for fifteen.

Oddly, it’s a very pleasant way to spend a few minutes of your day. It seems also like a great way to involve kids in appreciating arts and graphics. The trading is kinda fun, and its neat to see what the artists are producing. I recommend it, if you generally get a little pleasure out of looking at artwork. And most important of all: if you sign up using this link right here, you’ll get an extra ten free packs and so will I. If you do sign up or have played on the site, I’m curious to know what you think.