Playing Cards Effect in Elementor (Without Custom GSAP) — Here’s How

A few years ago, every SaaS hero and every agency site I looked at that wanted “premium” had it. That card-fan effect. The one where the cards start fanned out a few degrees and spread horizontally, and on hover the top one lifts. That’s a GSAP build. A few hundred lines. A frame-rate prayer.

Funny thing — that exact effect has its own widget now. In Elementor. On the free version of Elementor. Called Playing Cards Effect, it’s in Reboot Addons Pro, and the free version of Reboot Addons has a bunch of things in it that you’d expect to be Pro-locked too.

How the actual effect works

The fan isn’t a stack of images. It’s a repeating list of card containers — a repeater, not a widget per card — each one with independent positioning. Under the hood, a single GSAP engine with ScrollTrigger drives the entrance and the spread. What you set in the widget panel is the physics. Rotation Difference (how much each card leans relative to the previous one), Horizontal Spread (how far the edge cards drift to each side), Vertical Spread (the offset for a fanned layout), and Hover Lift (how many pixels the hovered card moves up before it releases). Everything else — the easing, the transform-based movement so it stays on the compositor, the mobile collapsed state — that’s the widget. Not you.

Where else this effect shows up in Reboot Addons

Playing Cards isn’t a one-off. If the fan is your style, take a look at these other card-style builds I’ve put in the same engine:

I built a 3D carousel for free Elementor and it’s the other half of the same card family — pure CSS 3D spinning, no GSAP in it. Both are Reboot Addons. Both work without Elementor Pro.

Glow Cards is the neighbouring Pro widget — same card family, different physics (a cursor-tracked glow blob instead of a fan), same no-Elementor-Pro rule.

Here’s the specific 3D-carousel-with-text build. Same engine, different shape.

The free image-only wheel and the rest of the card family live on the 3D carousel family page — that’s where the free side is, and it’s the same “you set values in the panel, no code” rule.

Is Playing Cards Effect free?

It’s a Reboot Addons Pro widget. Reboot Addons itself ships seven content widgets in the WordPress plugin repo — 3D Carousel, 3D Vertical Carousel, Card Slider, Content Fade Reveal, Advanced Menu, Business Hours, Elementor Back Button — plus all six Form Stylers. That’s the free tier. That’s the free tier. Pro is where Playing Cards lives.

Do I need Elementor Pro?

No. That’s the point I always make. Playing Cards runs on free Elementor. The widget uses GSAP under the hood — bundled, no need to add it separately — but it doesn’t require the Elementor Pro side to be active either.

Can I edit what’s on each card after I’ve added them?

Yes. Each card in the repeater has an Admin Label so you know what it is, and the card itself takes any Elementor child widgets. Text, an image, a form, another widget — that’s on you. The fan physics are the same; what’s on each card is content.

Does it look the same on mobile?

You set the mobile state yourself. The widget has a Mobile Vertical (Collapsed) control — a single toggle that stacks the cards vertically on small screens. That’s the sensible default. If you want the fan to hold, the physics controls apply, but I’d always recommend the collapse on phones.

The effect every SaaS hero has — now a widget with a panel. If you’ve got a client site that wants that “premium card fan” on the login, the pricing page, or the hero, and you don’t want to be writing GSAP by hand, that’s what this is for.

Playing Cards is a Reboot Addons Pro widget. The same engine is behind the rest of the card family. Free version below.

Try the free Reboot Addons