Dungeon Crawler Carl Got a Trading Card Set, and Yes, This Is a Big Deal

A guy posts a ridiculous story online about a man, his ex-girlfriend’s cat and the end of the world. A few years later, it has sold millions of books, has a TV show in production, and now it has trading cards. If you told me that was the plan, I’d have asked what you were smoking. But here we are, and Dungeon Crawler Carl just got its first official card set.

I’ll walk you through how it got here, because the story is half the reason these cards matter.

How a web serial took over the planet

Matt Dinniman, a Washington author, started posting Dungeon Crawler Carl on Royal Road, a site for web serials, around 2019 or 2020 (sources disagree on the year). The setup is gloriously stupid in the best way: the Earth gets wiped out and turned into a game show dungeon, and Carl, a regular guy in boxers, ends up dragging his ex-girlfriend’s cat, Princess Donut, through it. Readers pushed it up the site’s trending lists, which is how you know people weren’t just being polite.

In fall 2020, Dinniman self-published book one on Amazon. Audiobooks followed, and this is where it gets wild. Narrator Jeff Hays, who voices something like 200 characters by book eight, became the engine that drove the whole thing. Dinniman has said roughly three quarters of his fans first met the series as an audiobook. So a lot of you found Carl while stuck in traffic, laughing out loud like a lunatic. I respect that.

By 2024, Penguin Random House’s Ace imprint picked up the print rights, with Dinniman keeping the digital rights. Then it went from “huge in the LitRPG corner of the internet” to “everywhere.” The New York Times reported more than six million copies sold across the first seven books by December 2025. Book one has spent weeks on the Times list and picked up an Arthur C. Clarke Award nomination. Book eight, A Parade of Horribles, came out May 12, 2026, and by July the first eight books were reported to have sold over 14 million copies. Yes, million. With an M.

And the machine kept rolling:

• TV: Peacock greenlit a live-action series in June 2026, with Seth MacFarlane’s company attached.
• Games: The tabletop RPG’s BackerKit campaign raised more than $4.5 million on day one and came close to $10 million by the end.
• Comics: A Webtoon adaptation, and a print volume from Vault Comics.
• Toys: Playmates Toys announced figures, plush, loot boxes and, finally, the thing we came here for.

The cards

The first official set is Dungeon Crawler World Earth Trading Cards, and the launch plays along with the joke: Playmates is putting it out under the name “Borant Corporation,” the evil game show company from the books. Whoever came up with that deserves a raise and a long vacation.

Here’s what’s known so far:

• Series 1 is a 100-card set across 11 categories: crawlers, NPCs, mobs, Borant Corp officials, and Carl and Princess Donut in outfits from several floors.
• Random inserts include sketch cards, signed cards, foil cards and green parallels.
• The first online drop at Hot Topic sold out. More retailers are expected over the next few months, so don’t panic-buy yet.

I don’t have confirmed pack prices or odds, and I’m not going to invent any. Check the retailer listing before you spend money.

Why a first set matters (and why I’m making a big deal about it)

You can buy a figure. You can buy a plush. A card set is a different animal, and any collector will tell you why.

It’s a snapshot. A checklist is the franchise saying, “These are the characters that mattered.” Who gets a card, who doesn’t, who gets the good art. Fans will argue about that list for years.

It’s the first. There is only one first official set. Every future series, every reprint, every anniversary version comes after it. Collectors have always cared about firsts, and that isn’t a coincidence or a scam. It’s the nature of the thing. The first set is where the franchise’s history starts.

It’s a hunt. You can’t buy “one Carl.” You open packs, chase the foil, hope for a signed card, and trade duplicates with a friend who needs the one you keep pulling. Completing a set takes time and a bit of luck, and the story of how you finished it is part of the prize.

It’s small and portable. A card fits in a pocket, a binder or a top loader. A statue sits on a shelf and collects dust. A card gets taken out, looked at, and shown to people.

It outlasts the hype. Right now Dungeon Crawler Carl is everywhere. At some point it won’t be the loudest thing on the internet, and the cards will still be there, in binders and shoeboxes, waiting for somebody to find them and say, “Remember this?”

The Deadly Fly take

This is exactly why I started Deadly Fly Collectibles. When I was a kid, it was simple: watch the show, beg for the action figure, sit on the living room floor. I had no idea I was collecting memories. I was just a kid who liked Skeletor.

Today’s kids, and plenty of grown-up kids, are living that moment with Carl and Donut. Maybe that first pack, the one you open in a parking lot because you can’t wait until you get home, is the one you’ll be talking about in thirty years. I can’t prove it. Nobody can. That’s the point. Nobody ever knows which ones will matter.

So grab a pack if you want one. Keep what you pull, and don’t let anybody tell you you’re too old for it.

By the way, if your Donut card comes out of the pack creased, that’s not a grading issue, that’s a Borant Corp reality check.

Sources: Sole Retriever, Playmates press release, The Pop Insider, Seattle Met, Wikipedia

Details as reported in October 2026. Pack prices, odds and future release dates may change.