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The thing with pen & paper RPGs is that any material is available to everyone. 
Throwing an artificial rarity onto RPG source-materials is completely futile, even before rampant filesharing  of OCR scans of every-damn-thing is considered.  It's like insisting Ted can't use stuff out of the book Bill bought until Ted also buys that book.

Also, Spellfire sucked.

Where DnD has had cards from as far back as AD&D, I hope that they would not go down a collectable card game rpg as they did gamma world. Collectable card games are better for head-head games where the person with the most money to spend on the card usually wins not an rpg. (I appologize for the Magic Players here if you don't agree, but it is my experience that fighting a guy with a bunch of mox'ies, black lotuses, channels, lightening bolts, and forks kinda well sucked). And I shudder to think of my last experience as a noob at the DnD encounters table where everyone whipped out personal collectable fortune cards, started doing super things, and I felt like a angel with a tree up my rump as I sat there wondering why DnD suddenly became a game where I was alienated from their little society of "you cannot do that because you don't have the card..." it just wasn't an rpg.

If they did make DnD the CCG it would be the first edition of DnD I do not get... which would be a sad sad day.

But on the other hand, the cards have always been a bonus if we can have them all available to us (and not collectable), so that the DM & players could fashion a world they like.

Jan 24, 2012 -- 9:47PM, penandpaper2 wrote:

One way to increase profits would be to design D&D more like Magic.  Have rare cards, sell packages designed by class, and cross your fingers it makes money. 

Fortune Cards and the mini line were sold like Magic cards.  Don't know how successful they were, exactly, but the mini line is gone, and there's 3 sets of fortune cards, so far, so maybe 50/50?  They also tested the CCG-mechanic-in-an-RPG with Gamma World before they did Fortune Cards, so that'd also make it look pretty plausible. 

In order to make profit claims sound plausible to their Dark Corporate Overloards at Hasbro, WotC /did/ try to make out 4e DDI to be some sort of WoW-like on-line cash cow.  Maybe they'll try that sort of pitch with 5e, but using the more plausible idea of CCG-like revenue, given that they invented CCGs.

One of the long-time problems with D&D has been the 'vancian' system, which, in 4e, spread to all classes (Daily powers).  Daily powers screw up encounter balance, and narrow the ways in which you can run the game, as well as making classes harder to balance.  Getting rid of them would arguably improve the game, but, it'd leave the game very 'flat' as well, with only 1/encounter tricks for 'peak power.' 

Gamma World has no dailies, but it does have peak-power tricks - using a CCG mechanic.  Instead of more potent mutations that are useable 1/day (classic Gamma World had a few), PCs get to draw an 'alpha mutation' card from a deck they build at the start of the encounter.  The mutation is more powerful than a regular encounter mutation, is useable once that encounter, and will be discarded at the end of then encounter (and might morph to a different one before you get to use it).  A similar mechanic is used for magic items (also a major source of issues throughout D&D history).  When you find an item, your DM /might/ assign you an item, but most likely he'll have you draw from a deck you built (like a 'wish list') or from a deck he customized to represent the items that might be found in the area your in or from a default DM Deck that comes with the game.  When you use an item, at the end of the encounter, you roll a check to see if it still works, if you fail, you discard it (and, if it's from your own deck, may eventually find it again) or 'salvage' it as a much less potent item.  Decks of exploits, spells, prayers, and magic items might easily replace both class and item daily powers.