Digital collectible card games: The good, the bad and the ugly

Digital collectible card games have millions of users and generate hundreds of millions in revenue for the major corporations that develop them. Almost all of them are translations of successful tabletop products; however, a few digital natives have managed to leave a mark in this space.

Our evaluation system for dividing the most popular card games into categories considers how you acquire new cards, how the game is monetised, what the competitive scene is like, and how well the game has fared over the years since launch.

Good games are those where it is free and relatively easy to put together a competitive deck and have fun in online modes. Bad games are those that don’t try to rip their users off on purpose, but are built in a way that ultimately results in an unpleasant time on either the money or gameplay side. Those games we’ve labelled ugly promise a free-to-play experience but deliver the opposite, especially for those who want to stay on top of the meta. 

The most popular digital card games are tie-ins to physical TCGs or extremely popular video games and movie franchises. The Pokémon universe and the Yu-Gi-Oh! universe has two digital card games: one for mobile users and another for “more serious” PC players.

Ben Brode, the legendary creator of Hearthstone (Blizzard’s smash hit in the space), is the author of another entry into our list: Marvel Snap, another huge success at launch that has managed to lose a substantial portion of its fanbase because of its greedy monetisation. 

Then there’s Wizards of the Coast, inventors of the trading card game genre with Magic: The Gathering and its online version Arena. Their support for the game (which mirrors the physical release) has been unrelenting, but it’s evident that, for its developers, Arena is a side project, especially on the competitive side.

Pokémon TCG Live is considered one of the fairest digital collectible card games on the market. Not only is it very friendly towards free to play users (meaning you can get most of the cards for free by simply playing), but there’s also a system in place where if you buy a pack of Pokémon cards in real life, there’s a code inside to have those cards found in the booster in your digital collection. This makes Pokémon Live a mirror of a player’s real-life collection and decks. 

Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel is very popular for a reason: its free-to-play model is considered to be quite generous by players. Simply playing the game, especially in ranked mode, grants users enough premium currency to get new cards and build new meta decks. Some users lament a tendency towards the lowering of the game’s free rewards in the last few months, but it has a solid player base and a yearly competitive scene, with live finals alongside the world championship of the physical version of the Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG.

Magic: The Gathering Arena, like Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links don’t have the friendliest monetisation practices, nor the most fleshed-out esports scenes. However, the experience you get playing them is fine, and with enough grind, they manage to deliver on the fun of collecting cards and playing competitively with them.

Their model is best described as “pay to not play” as a lot of grind can be skipped by opening one’s wallet, but as both games have fun mechanics (Duel Links even has another entire game and format within called Rush Duel), if you love them, you won’t mind grinding them.

Marvel Snap and Pokémon TCG Pocket are in the lowest category of our list for different, but adjacent, reasons. Snap has just revamped its monetisation systems to make it virtually impossible, even for the grindiest and most devoted players, to acquire some limited-time event-related cards without spending real money. Despite the uproar in the community, the developer Second Dinner did nothing to mitigate their decision, opting for a firm stance regarding monetisation, which did not go well with the fans.

Pokémon TCG Pocket has a similar problem where, due to the very low pull rate of the EX cards (its most powerful), it is almost impossible to get two copies of the one people need without engaging with the Pack Points System. This makes it so that the more packs are opened, the more credits a player gets, and while there’s no way of buying a single pack, you can shorten the time in between when the game gives you one with real money. 

There is a limit to how much a player can spend daily, but it’s set at over $100, so it’s not really a limiting factor. The end result is that players with deep pockets, at the release of a new expansion, can spend a lot, get the latest cards quickly, and dominate the competitive ranks. 

Digital collectible card games are here to stay: they are fun on every platform, especially mobile, and generate a lot of money for their publishers. Ultimately, the choice on which one to pick up comes down to fandom and passion, but some are more virtuous than others.