I really enjoy the Marvel Trading Card game, the game itself is fun, gives a lot of variety and options, and digs pretty deep into the marvel catalog.

This game starts solid by basically delivering that game exactly; however, it quickly becomes repetitive and boring by failing to deliver on other crucial aspects to card games, collecting and deck building.

Collecting-

Basically, everyone who likes card games has at least some enjoyment from collecting a cool collection. One thing I love about games like this (normally) is that this collecting isn't based on a $ amount, but on the success in the game.

Yes, you earn points to buy packs, but the packs are painfully small at 6 cards a piece. To make matters worse, there is no clearly stated theme to the various packs, so its really hard to decide how to purchase cards.

There is no collection list to see if you are missing cards, nor rarity assigned to see if you get anything noteworthy.

Basically, you pay points, flip through 6 cards, shrug, because you have no idea if you even got anything rare or close to completing collecting from that pack.

In a game where the story is (expectedly) mediocre, the music bad, but the card game good, this is a huge flaw.

Deck Building

The other corner stone of every good card game, this is dragged down heavily by the collecting issues. It's tough to plan or get excited about decks when you have no idea how to get more X-men or Spider-Friends for instance. So I ended up making a deck that was a mish mash of my best cards, which while it worked, was just boring.

The deck building itself is painfully tedious on the DS, with minute clicks needed, and filtering comparable to the original Pokemon Trading card game, which was on Gameboy!

I found myself buying hordes of packs before diving into deck building because it was such a pain.

Beyond these two big flaws, each game feels just tedious. Occasionally a character has a gimmick which lends the match some flavor, such as starting with Lady Deathstrike.

The game would have had better pacing if early minions had less health, while bosses had more, etc. This could have created variety in the matches.

The game also only follows one path, making the player lose all agency for how they advance in the game. You win a match, and click the next one, which will feel basically the same. Occasionally a bland Marvel story pops up in between.

It's a shame, the bones of this game are solid, and it could be really fun, but by the 27% mark I found myself just not caring, which signals it being time to stop playing.