Let's look at how collecting trading cards works you'll need to get all 8 unique cards first which you can do by playing roughly 3 4 hours for natural drops, or speed things up by grabbing them from the community market. Watch for specific cards like geralt, ciri, and eredin since they're essential for crafting. The actual badge system is pretty straightforward, when you collect the full set you can craft the standard game badge which is interesting since it gives you 100 steam xp, some random emoticons, and special profile backgrounds. Good to know that unlike what you might have heard there isn't actually any special "taxidermy" badge or limited time version just the regular steam badge progression that you can work on anytime. The trading interface can be a bit confusing at first but once you find the badge crafting section in your steam profile, it's pretty clear what you need to do. Keep an eye on card prices in the market since they tend to fluctuate, might save you some cash if you time your purchases right.

Just make sure you're signed into steam and have some playtime logged before expecting those card drops to start showing up