Has anyone ever tried to come up with a way to play Talisman using just the cards? Like a Magic The Gathering concept?

No, but a talisman-like card game could be great. Modular board

There have been a few ideas floated around over the years, but nothing much came of anything tbh.

I thought about a Talisman Card Game some years ago. In my opinion it is necessary to modify the original cards a little bit to get a playable and interesting game. But if anyone will post some ideas, I'm curious about it!

Like Azoic, several years back I also thought about making an expansion based on cards, and even made some, but for various reasons I dropped that project, and now I used the backs and the artwork for another expansion, so I don't think I will ever back to it.

The general idea of that expansion was to give players a hand of cards that more or less could be used like Spells. The difference was that players kept that cards in hand, and could use them in response to other cards being played (or either during own turn, or any turn), the cards either could stay in the game, or be discarded after using. Some of the cards required some tests (like rolling X or less using Y dice), or required players to play a game of "The Dragon and the Princess" (a small card game from one of Polish-only expansions from the old edition of Talisman), and depending of its outcome a different effect could be played.

Generally all of that little effects were represented by icons (~9 in total), and a single card had from 2 to 5 different icons at once.

On a simpler note why not, to begin with, have a set of playing cards with some of the best Talisman artwork on.

The "Aces" could be the Crown of Command, Pandoras Box,Horrible Black Void and the Dragon King.

Then going down to minor creatures for lower numbers.

The backs could be that of the Adventure cards.

It would be a nice little interesting addition for any Talisman collection and would make that game of Cribbage in th evening by a roaring fire that bit more enjoyable.

Wild Boar would have to be a number 2 and Dragon be number 7 :)I re

ally like the idea of Talisman playing cards!