For as long as I can remember, I've always loved card games. I grew up playing Yu-Gi-Oh! and the Pokémon TCG, from playground duels to dabbling in competitive tournaments, before life started getting in the way. So, given that lifelong dedication to deck building, you'd think I'd be a fan of all the mobile card games out there, and you'd be right. Well, you'd have been right about twelve months ago. 2025, sadly, was the year I fell out of love with digital CCGs, and I doubt I'm the only one.
In late 2024, I was hooked on Pokémon TCG Pocket, continuing to grind away in Marvel Snap, and occasionally revisiting Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links to get my game on Yugi Moto style. So, what changed? Well, it depends on which of these mobile card games you're talking about, and in some ways, not much has changed. That is, except for my tolerance to the pains of power creep, extortionate microtransactions, and the pity systems that are, for lack of a better word, pitiful.
First, let's dig into power creep. If you've not heard of this concept before, allow me to quickly explain it. Let's say I release a collectable card game; we'll call it Connor's Funky Dueltime Fun, or CFDF for short. In the first pack, the character cards have anything from 50 to 80 health points. Then, two months later, I introduce a new CFDF expansion, but this time, the character cards vary from 70 to 100 health points. After a few months of this pattern, the mediocre cards from a new set are more powerful than the best cards from the original, and that, my friends, is power creep.
Now that you know what power creep is, you can probably guess the reason behind it, but there are two reasons it exists. From a game design point of view, it's intended to keep things fresh and to make sure a meta doesn't get stale. What I mean by that is, if I released a new pack of CFDF cards - don't think you've gotten away from that analogy just yet - and one particular character card dominated 80 or 90% of competitive decks, then power creep can be a good thing, diluting the potency of the offending card by way of newer, more powerful alternatives, or counters.
The second reason we see so much power creep is that it makes sense from a business perspective. To play any card game at a high level, you need the best cards, and if the best cards change every few months, you have to buy new ones. That's pretty simple, and to be honest, I can accept it. The problem is when power creep becomes aggressive, and that, at least in my opinion, is what's happened with Pokémon TCG Pocket over the last few months.
The best example comes from the latest set at the time of writing, Crimson Dive. The star Pokémon TCG Pocket card of the expansion, Mega Charizard Y ex, has 220 HP and an attack that can deal 250 damage points. That's a bit of a difference compared to the original Charizard ex, which arrived over a year ago, with 180 HP and an attack that deals 200 damage points, which itself was the strongest card in the game at the time.
It might not sound like a massive jump in power, but it's considerable in the context of the game, and it makes for a miserable experience if you're jumping back in for a couple of online battles only for meta decks with the Mega Evolved Charizard laying waste to your cards. For context, Mega Charizard Y ex's attack is powerful enough to wipe out almost every card in the game for the small sacrifice of 50 HP, and the only cards truly capable of countering the fiery icon are from the same new set.
Pokémon TCG Pocket isn't the only power creep offender, though. I've seen a similar issue in Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links over the years, but it's a different kind of power creep. When Duel Links first launched, it used a lot of cards from the early days of the TCG, most of which had basic effects. I'm talking about cards like Man-Eater Bug, which destroys a card when flipped face-up, or Muka Muka, a monster that gains attack and defense points based on how many cards you hold.
This return to simplicity made for a nice change from the TCG, which, over the course of twenty years or so, got a lot more complicated. However, it didn't last for long. Within a couple of years, Konami opted to import more contemporary cards, with massive and often convoluted effect text boxes. Before long, it became difficult to keep up with all the new effects, so if you came back for a couple of duels, you'd often spend most of your opponent's turns trying desperately to read a text box while watching a time-consuming combo wipe out your basic cards.
Still, it's not power creep alone that turned me off Duel Links and Pokémon TCG Pocket. In fact, I wouldn't mind it at all if it weren't for another factor - these games are expensive. This is also where Marvel Snap comes into play, as, in defense of developer Second Dinner, regular retooling of new and old cards makes power creep less of an issue, but the cards themselves, well, they're pricey.
Let's, just for funsies, do a quick breakdown of about how much a pack, or in the case of Marvel Snap, a single card, costs in each game. It's a bit tricky with Duel Links and TCG Pocket, as you get more currency for buying cards the more you spend on a resource bundle, but on average, you're looking at about $0.80 to $1.20 for a pack, which we'll call $1 to make life easier. It sounds cheap compared to the real-life equivalents, but remember, this is all digital; there's no manufacturing or shipping costs involved here, and as I'm about to get into, you can spend a whole lot and still not find your chase card.
You might be thinking, gacha games are expensive; why aren't you moaning about them, too? Well, a lot of gacha games have a pity system, securing you a rare character if you spend enough in a pretty self-explanatory way. Marvel Snap, Pokémon TCG Pocket, and Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links each have their own spin on the pity system, but they all feel a little unfair.
In TCG Pocket, you earn five Pack Points for a specific set for every pack you open. Ex cards, which are often the staple of a deck, cost 500 points. That means that, if you're unlucky enough never to get the card you're looking for in a pack, you're going to have to open 100 to buy it from the Pack Point shop. You get two packs a day if you're a free-to-play user, so that means spending 50 days potentially hunting down one card, and given that new packs land pretty much once a month; by the time you finally get it, there's probably something different to chase.
Worse still, if you're trying to build a meta deck, you need two copies of the staple card you're looking for, so you need 1k Pack Points, which, if you're not good at math, means opening 200 packs. I know this pain. It's the main reason I cancelled my premium Pokémon TCG Pocket battle pass and now only occasionally hop on for a single-pack-opening serotonin boost. For me, it was Giratina ex, eluding me for so long that by the time I finally got it, the community and meta had moved on.
Duel Links feels a bit fairer, but not by much. In this game, the shop holds a stock of 180 packs per set, and in those, at least one copy of every card in the set is guaranteed. This is where, like TCG Pocket, it becomes a bit of a lottery, but you're at least guaranteed the rarest cards from a given set if you open 180 packs. Using the math from earlier, that equates to about $180 per set. To really make a top-tier deck, though, you probably need that card three times over. If you're always unlucky, you could restock the shop twice after finally getting the monster, trap, or spell you need, potentially spending over $400.
Moving on to Marvel Snap, and that's a different beast altogether. Let's say, for instance, you want to buy Arishem, a Series Five card, and make an Arishem deck - which kind of makes me hate you, because Arishem Marvel Snap decks are annoying, but this is a case study, so I'll let you off this time. There are a few ways you can go about it, but they all require Collector's Tokens, and Collector's Tokens cost gold. Second Dinner has never offered an exact calculation of how many Collector's Tokens you get for your gold, not that I could find at least, but it seems the math works out to about 0.8 Tokens for every one gold, and 100 gold costs around $1 to $150, again, depending on how much you buy at once.
Now, back to that Arishem you're trying to get. There are two ways you can go here. You can spend 4k tokens, which we're saying is around 5k gold, or $50, for a Series Five pack and simply hope for the best. The problem with this option is that the fewer Series Five cards you have, the bigger the possible card pool, and the lower your chance of getting Arishem. This is another lesson I've learned the hard way.
However, you can guarantee that Arishem, it might just take a while. A few months after launching, Second Dinner implemented a daily card mechanic, allowing you to purchase a single card from the shop from each series. Series Five cards are the most expensive, costing 6k collector's tokens. The pity element comes in with the pin feature, as when a card pops up in the shop, after it randomly refreshes every eight hours, you can pin it so it won't leave the shop until you buy it.
That means you're checking three times a day until you see Arishem, and then it's just the case of either saving collector's tokens from in-game grinding, which takes a long time, or parting with around 7.5k gold. That's around $70 to finally get the card you've hunted for. Yes. If you've got no tokens or gold left, and you're going from scratch, a single card is going to cost you roughly $70, or a few measly dollars less if there's a gold sale on.
Remember when I said earlier that Marvel Snap's regular reworks are a good thing? Well, this is where they can be not so good. Imagine for a second, you've just done it. You've just paid $50 to top up your gold, converted it to Collector's Tokens, and bought Arishem. That's what I did, but with Galactus, who held the meta in a universal chokehold for a little while. I paid the money so I could compete online, and not three days later, the planet-eater got nerfed into oblivion. App deleted. Done. No looking back. Okay, I did eventually reinstall the game, but I've not spent a single penny on resources or the battle pass since.
Now, to be fair, in all those examples, I haven't accounted for free in-game resources. However, to take advantage of those resources to their fullest, my final annoyance comes into play. I'm talking about dailies. If you've played any mobile game, you probably know about dailies. These are missions that refresh once a day, often with relatively simple requirements, that reward you with some currency.
Free things are great, sure, but this mechanic also instills a weird sort of fear of missing out that makes you feel like you're almost losing money by not logging in for a single day. That's the nucleus of the problem, really, at least for me. My relationship with mobile games, particularly mobile card games, has an economic factor that I can't compare to the experience I get from playing my favorite Switch games or Steam Deck games. I buy them, and I have them, and maybe I'll check out the DLC if I really enjoy the base game. For all the mobile CCG examples I've mentioned, it can be hard to enjoy the core experience unless you're willing to spend every month.
Ultimately, what Marvel Snap, Pokémon TCG Pocket, and Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links have in common is the key thing that made me quit real-life trading card games. If you want to compete, it's an expensive hobby. The difference is, at least with the actual cards - you know, the real-life cardboard ones - you've got a collection of cool things, and, more importantly, there's some resale value. That last bit is important, as when power creep does hit, you can move your old cards on, admittedly, for less than you bought them, and spend on the new meta.
Neither of those factors is true of a digital card collection. For one, cards have no resale value, at least not without indulging in the digital black market, and that's a risk I'm not about to take. Worse still, I am at all times one forgotten password away from losing everything I spent my money on, and that realization, combined with my own penchant for locking myself out of Gmail like an idiot, is what finally led me to give up on mobile card games. That is, I assume, until the next one comes out, and I learn my lesson all over again. Now, anyone for a game of Shadowverse: Worlds Beyond?