No advice to give since I'm not in a profession or position to need cards, but the first thing that came to mind was that maybe you should get two different options depending on the client? Once to impress and one to pin on the bulletin board at waffle house. That way you could justify nicer ones for the occasions you need them for?
That's not a bad idea at all - I didn't even think about that! I'm used to ordering one item for all my needs, but doing some cheaper cards for the boards (which are totally a thing here) is a really good idea!
I've never judged business cards very critically, but it seems like a simple, uncluttered layout on decent cardstock with perhaps a little gold embossing comes across as pretty classy.
My goal is something that isn't immediately thrown away. The advantage of metal cards or otherwise "really weird" cards is that people don't generally immediately throw them away.
Entirely different line of work -- but I don't actually use business cards any more. I put those resources into making sure that when people google me they find me. (But I never was much good at in-person networking: even when I had cards I seldom ended up handing one to anyone.)
I'm Googleable for an awful lot of my side gigs (search for electric bike battery rebuilding, you'll probably find me, and an awful lot of terms find me as the #1 hit), but I'm trying to expand locally, and this is a non-internet chunk of the country. You literally can't even find out about town festivals on the internet half the time - I've shown up at the end of a celebration because I had the wrong year's Facebook post as data. It's... pretty laid back and rural out here.
The problem is that while I service all of North America for some of my stuff, I want to focus more on local work for a lot of areas, and that's not something I can do via the internet. That's something you do at the local bars.
I also don't want something that screams "Wow, fancy coastal type with his fancy business cards" - so the laser cut acrylic stuff is probably out.
Just a hard balance to strike, but going with a few grades does solve that problem neatly...