The Digimon TCG is imo, better than yugioh and pokemon. I don’t know about magic but I’ve had a lot of fun playing it so far.
I love the emphasis put on digievolving, and going from egg to ultimate is exhilarating. The free-form turn is a nice change of pace from other card games with stricter “phases” (Yugioh, for example), and the memory mechanic is awesome and allows for some great strategic moments.
And the art is gorgeous. MtG used to be king for me, but the over-reliance on collabs the last few years soured my experience with it. I loved the simple and clean aesthetic of Yugioh, but these days it’s just an endless stream of waifu cards. Digimon’s card pool is 95% cool-as-fuck monster/robot mishmash, which I enjoy a lot more than cutesy anime girls and random-product-placement-from-popular-IP.
The only thing I didn’t like from what I played in the early days was how scarce Blocker effects were, and the player’s “hit points” being 5 random cards from their deck, which works counter-intuitively and against the digievolving aspect, as your key cards may get stuck in the “hit points” pile without being able to do anything to prevent it. As chains get longer (going from lv3 to lv6), the risk of losing key cards in such a way becomes increasingly harder to justify.
These two pain points were the reason why, in the early days, rookie spam was meta and the most effective winning strategy - it was easier and more cost-efficient to just spam the field with lv3 Digimon and go straight for the opponent’s hit points, rather than actually playing the game the way it was intended.
In the early days, the game was barebone, with unbalanced mechanics and lack of a proper strategic component, but from what I’ve seen (as I’m not able to play the game due to it being completely non-existent where I live), it’s become better lately. I think they’ve even updated the tutorial app to better showcase the state of the game.
I hope the digital card game will breathe new life into the game. I’d like to go back to collecting cards I like and playing at locals with friends.
Duuuude. How cool is the memory mechanic? I love it.
Freeform broke my brain a little at the beginning. Not having a battle phase separate from the main phase was just confusing.
The blocker concept actually made my girlfriend angry xD
I agree with the “hit point”. I’ve not run into the issue myself though.
I’m not a big TCG player in general. I’ve dabbled in most of the major ones and I just didn’t really have fun. But I’ve had a lot of fun with the digimon one - looking forward to the app, whenever that is!
