Sent From My Phone: Card Game Burnout

Sent From My Phone is a series of blogs that are, as the name suggests, typed on my phone, in the spaces surrounding and in-between time at my day job. Enjoy!

I am a Trading Card Game guy. Always have been. I have memories of playing the Pokémon TCG as a kid in a Bloomington Barnes and Nobles.

Side bar, but the league’s cool thing was that, once you got your first badge, the league leaders would give you a lanyard with a Cool Pokémon-based nickname. I was really looking forward to mine, because other kids had some really cool ones. Mine ended up being Jakuna, complete with Base Set Kakuna. I was so disappointed.

This is an artist’s rendition. Unfortunately, no documentation of the original item currently exists.

Anyway, I eventually came back to the Pokémon TCG on the other side, running my own league for kids (they did not receive disappointing nicknames). In the space between I started playing Hearthstone, which was a brand new kind of Thing for me to do. It was easy to collect cards, easier to find people to play. No need to wait til league night each week! No need to awkwardly text all my semi-Pokémon friends and try to organize a time to play games.

The last ~5 years I’ve found it harder to focus on single-player games. Part of it is based on the fact I’m so used to playing games communally that it’s just tough for me to focus up. I also just…. Sometimes I want to focus on a podcast, or a stream, or a YouTube video. And I need a game that doesn’t require me to hold a controller. That’s the kind of hole that a Digital Card Game is perfectly sized for.

Marvel Snap, a mobile card game that dropped last year from most of the grandfathers of Hearthstone, has been an incredible game for that purpose. I can get 2 or 3 games in while riding the bus to and from work, I can have it on one monitor while I pay more attention to something else. It has a great capital-F Feel and it’s visually optimized for mobile; Plus, if my hands are cold I, running Marvel Snap for more than a few games can really heat this bad boy up.

Also, it kind of sucks to play right now! And the short length of games has changed my relationship to Hearthstone, whose 30-40 minute single games feel like an eternity in comparison. Plus, Pokemon’s new digital TGC interface is so, so much worse than the one it retired.

I find that it’s less likely I’m enjoying a game of one of these apps than that I’m simply Filling Time. But I gotta play, because I’m a trading card game guy. What am I if I don’t have a trading card game?