Every year someone declares the business card dead, and every year the best-connected people I know keep handing them out. The card isn't dead. Bad cards are dead on arrival, which is different.
What a card still does: it exists after the conversation ends. A LinkedIn connection is one of four hundred. A card sits on a desk, in a jacket, on a fridge, physically interrupting the person days later. No notification to swipe away. That persistence is the entire product — which is why flimsy 300gsm-with-free-glitter cards fail. Persistence only works if the object feels worth keeping.
The wallet test: a month after an event, which cards survive the clear-out? The heavy ones. The ones with a clean idea. The one with something useful on the back — a rate card, a size chart, a QR to a portfolio that actually loads. Thickness is not vanity; it's a proxy for how seriously you take your own business, judged in half a second of thumb-feel.
What kills cards: seven services listed in 6pt type, a gradient from 2011, an email address from a free provider on a card claiming "established 25 years". And ordering 1,000 cheap ones instead of 250 good ones — you will redesign long before you hand out a thousand.
Spend the small money properly: 400gsm up, matt laminate or uncoated, one job for the front (who you are), one for the back (why keep this). Foil and spot-UV when the market expects premium — Wilmslow expects it; a builders' merchant counter doesn't care.
Cheap format. Long life. Still the highest ROI print product I know when it's designed, not decorated.