Online TCGs: Hearthstone vs Yu-Gi-Oh Duel Links
For years, going back to my childhood, I’ve dabbled in various competitive card games - most consistently Yu-Gi-Oh! but also Pokemon, Netrunner, Magic the Gathering, and Mojang’s Scrolls. When a friend introduced me to Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links I couldn’t resist.
The premise is pretty simple, your starting character is one of the two main characters from the original TV series - (Yami) Yugi or Seto Kaiba; and your aim is to rise to the top of Duel Links tournament which pits the best duelists in the world against each other. You have a starting deck based on your character’s deck from the original series and you battle other duelists to gain experience points in order to level up your character, which unlocks skills and new cards for your deck. Separate from your character’s level there are ‘stages’ of the game which can be progressed through by competing various challenges, such as ‘Win 5 duels’ or ‘Use 10 trap cards’. Completing stages unlocks additional characters from the TV show such as Joey Wheeler, who can be battled against or played as. Although a tad cheesy the game’s theme is actually one of its strengths, the setting is familiar and embedded deep in the heart of the game without being overbearing or annoying.
In fact Duel Links’ feel is polished to near perfection. Moments like pulling a rare card from a pack or summoning a signature card have dazzling animations to accompany them and moments of dialogue between rival characters are nostalgic and true to the game’s source material. Even the mechanism used to encounter duelists in the ‘Duel World’ feels like it was designed to deliberately feel like you’re part of a city wide tournament. Unfortunately, whilst the experience of playing captures the TV show, creating a deck doesn’t feel anything like playing the physical TCG.
Duel Links’ central, and fatal, flaw is the difficulty of constructing a good deck. In the game there are three methods for obtaining cards. Buying packs from the shop, trading with the card trader, and beating duelists. Each of which is worse than the last. The shop is potentially the least offensive. It offers a stock of several types of pack, each with a different variety of cards in it and before purchase you’re able to know which cards are left in the box and their rarity. Each pack costs 50 gems (which equates to roughly 30-60 mins of play) and offers three cards. The main issue is of course, getting the right cards. Packs are designed in such a way there’s a mixture of useful and useless cards and for most players each kind of pack will have only a handful of cards you want. The card trader is even worse, he deals in an entirely separate currency of gold, stones, and other unique objects which are obtained unreliably as random drops from duelists in duel world or by converting cards into stones. His stock rotates daily making acquiring cards from him more a matter of good fortune rather than strategy. Duelists drops are the worst of all, all duelists offer a large pool of cards they might drop which are a mixture of a generic shared pool of low level monsters and other ineffective cards and the cards unique to them reducing the chances of getting a good card to near nil. The inability to reliably obtain cards hamstrings everyone’s ability to build a good deck resulting in duels where whoever can get the biggest beatstick on the field first wins. As much as I long to build a fantastic Amazoness deck the reality is it’d take me hundreds of hours of grinding.
After investing a week of my life playing Duel Links I’m left feeling pretty disappointed. There’s so much promise here and I want it to be good. Concepts like the Vagabond, a unique duelist that challenges you with a handicap in exchange for higher XP, and the worldwide events draw me in - but no matter how much I steel myself to play it, I’m always left with a sour taste in my mouth after I open a pack.
Frustrated by Duel Links I decided to try out Hearthstone, Blizzard’s online TCG. Immediately I became aware of just how polished the Duel Links Android app is. My first few attempts to play Hearthstone were ruined by strange signup flow errors and the tutorial experience left a lot to be desired. In fact, the whole Hearthstone mobile client runs pretty poorly. That said the game does have an innate charm. The music, the small interactions on the game boards, the unique voice lines given to heroes and cards create a fantastic depth of experience that intentionally form the basis for a surprisingly deep card game.
Whilst I was initially spurred on to try Hearthstone on the basis of economy, it turns out Hearthstone is just as guilty in this arena. There are a few easy ways to get initial packs but for the most part you’re stuck paying 100 gold per pack and earning gold at the rate of 50-60 per day. Whilst a pack gives you a good number of cards, Hearthstone’s power level is really built around legendary cards - cards that drop with a frequency of roughly 1 in 20. Getting a good collection is an expensive and long process. That said, it’s one I somewhat ashamedly have to admit I took part in.
The basis of Hearthstone’s economy is probably its only souring point. The gameplay itself is rewarding in a way that most other card games fail to match. Blizzard take full advantage of the digital nature of the game in its card design, frequently producing gems like Nozdormu, Yogg-Saron, and Elise that simply wouldn’t work in a physical card game. Whilst game balance is never quite perfect in Hearthstone the revolving door of the ‘standard’ mode and the semi-frequent balance patches feel like a cleaner solution than errata or ban lists ever did.
In short, whilst Duel Links might have the more absorbing meta-game, when it comes to playing the card game itself Hearthstone is ahead of the curve.