What’s the Point of Digital Cards Without a Game?
Star Wars: Card Trader Review
Star Wars: Card Trader Review
I’ve been big on card games my whole life. I’ve collected cards too. There’s been a large resurgence of them with the likes of Pokémon Pocket pack openings, and I just finished a binge on Marvel Snap. The Google Play Store advertised this game to me, and I thought to myself, why not? What could a collection focused digital ‘game’ be like? You build a digital collection, get some free ones every week, what’s the difference when there’s no competition attached to their value. Let’s waste some time, see where it goes.
Surprisingly, removing the game component from digital cards didn’t immediately strip all the fun out of it. I gave it many chances to grow on me. Played for a solid 4 weeks when I would log in daily, open a few packs, and salvage a few cards for higher rarity ones. You do not need to spend real money on these cards, by the way, you can, but you should not and don’t need to keep your collection growing. But, after these 4 weeks, I’m just left with a hollow sense of… “What’s the point?” Which led to a bigger question, “what kind of player is this even for?”
Because truthfully, if you’ve never liked card collecting before, then you won’t get into this game. I think my slight nostalgia for Star Wars as a brand is about the only thing that pushed me through the past month. If you have neither of those, there’s no reason to even try, and I’d go as far as to say even if you enjoy both of those things, there are better options out there for you. It’s not even worth trying it for a day or two.
One thing that I was very disappointed in, was that the base cards are very ugly. The rounded portrait design for cards plays great in something like Hearthstone, but I hate it here, which is a shame because it’s a part of every common base card you get. There’s a part of me that believes this is done on purpose, because in contrast, there are some great looking cards without the ugly round portraits that you can collect, and obtaining those was the only fun ‘chase’ I had. Unfortunately, even some of these nice looking cards are presented in landscape mode, and there’s no easy way to look at them besides turning your phone sideways. I can see why they did that, but at the same time, I don’t know what they were thinking with that. It’s annoying.
The more I think about this concept as a whole, the more I see so much lost potential for the idea of “digital cards”. There are a few animated cards (and note that the word “animated” is really pushing it), but those seem like they were slapped together in five seconds. I could get more value from a GIF of the movies. It would have been cool if some cards were portrait and in the 9:16 ratio so that you could easily make them your phone background if you got a lucky draw from a pack or something. Could be neat for some to have a little 3D scene with some parallax. But nope. These are just as boring as their real counterparts would be. Even the most legendary, epic, and super rare cards are just… cards. Maybe with a little shimmer effect. Maybe with a poorly animated background. It’s a shame that it doesn’t leverage the medium to do something new with the idea of collecting cards.
That doesn’t just end with how they look. It extends into rarities. The nice ones I talked about earlier, they’re exceptionally rare, almost ludicrously so. Some odds are relatively reasonable, like, 1/75 for a Super Rare card. But in all my time playing for free, and almost exclusively trying for a card like that, I never saw a super rare. How about on the top end? The highest rarity card I saw in Card Trader was 1/100,000 for some of the really exclusive cards. In my entire time, I only obtained one epic rarity card, and that had about 500 copies in the ecosystem, which I imagine is the entire active player base.
There’s a lot of user UN-friendly design in this game, where it almost seems like they are purposefully taking out the convenience of common sense to make it so that I had to leave the app open because of a pointless 15-second timer, or navigate a few extra menus because they didn’t think to include one option over on another menu, etc. The tutorials that show you around the app aren’t great, either. This not to mention that the app’s performance isn’t well optimized, or is extremely demanding for no particular reason because it makes my phone run hot after a short time of it being open.
Truly, the most regrettable aspect of all is that there is nothing you can do with the cards. There’s not even a “fun” way to look at them, besides… looking at them (but there’s no zoom function or anything), and you can only showcase a few on your profile at a time. Obtaining sets is difficult to do and while I do see a lot of people who want to trade, there’s no way I want to even attempt to start to interacting with an account that’s appraised a whopping 10k points higher than mine. They seem like a nice community though from what I’ve read. But it’s so boring, man. I’m going back to Marvel SNAP.
Overall, maybe you like collecting cards, maybe you like Star Wars. Either way, I don’t think you’d enjoy this bland mix of both. Star Wars: Card Trader is ultimately a boring waste of time, whose soullessness is so dense that it will suck out your life force until you hit that beautiful ‘uninstall’ button. I strongly do not recommend it. For those with strong will and a desire to try despite what I have to say, you might play it for a few days, or give it a few generous weeks like me, but I believe the end result will be the same… You’ll leave, perhaps racked with guilt for fueling the Disney Star Wars corporate machine, and in the very least left with the question, “what’s even the point?”
Originally published at https://backloggd.com.