A really fun card game marred by disgusting monetization. Play for free if you plan on sticking with it long-term (playing daily) or just skip it entirely. There really isn't a good middle ground, the game lacks any form of decent catch-up mechanics, and the value you get per dollar is abysmal.

I'm CL 22,000, and I've been playing daily since the games global launch.

I won't fault any game for charging for cosmetics, but all too frequently awesome artists works are locked behind time limited one and done bundles that require you to buy $50-100 worth of currencies you might not want. Or worse, behind spending $200 total in a month, which now only counts purchases made through the webshop.

Players who take a break will struggle to catch-up with their collection, as you're at the whim of which cards they decide to run in spotlight caches, some haven't re-appeared for more than a year. And your only other option is to spend extremely rare tokens to get them. The best way to acquire those tokens is to buy them for cash, often in FOMO-bundles. Or 2,000 tokens (4-6k required per card) are awarded for every 10 variants you buy, which cost between 700 and 2400 gold or $10 to ~$30 USD each, unless you get a better rate buying a bundle, which aren't always available.

They've repeatedly made promises about features that encourage people to spend their resources only to cancel them entirely. Like First Edition badges which were to encourage people to buy new cards when they released, only to go silent on them and move on to other systems like spotlight caches.

Or the character mastery system, which promised a character-specific reward track for collecting cosmetics on your favourite cards. Despite showing pictures of the system, describing how it would work, and claiming it was "coming soon" for half a year. It was cancelled in the footnotes of an update citing "technical difficulties" in a very tone-deaf emoji filled send-off. Their replacement has been character albums, piggybacking off a system that already existed, and rather than counting for any character, only the ones they want to promote. Which so far seems like 2 additional characters per month (Wolverine and soon Deadpool for July to coincide with the new movie), as they release 4 or more new characters in the same time span.

Albums were supposed to be rewarding for people who like collecting variants of a certain theme or artist, and to encourage more people to collect. But most new albums are not made up of variants already sold in the game, they often release more than half an albums counted variants when they add the album to encourage new spending.

The latest deadpool's diner event is just another example of rampant monetization, with many players who lost their first round being locked out of the mode on a timer with a message asking them for 700 gold to keep playing, which costs as much as the monthly battle-pass to buy outside of bundles. For a handful of event-limited tokens called "bubs" which are used to gamble on match outcomes. You don't need to buy them to progress the event, you actually start earning them by the thousands and eventually millions over the course of several matches, depending on how often you win. But they seem to think its fair to charge people who are unfamiliar with the mode almost 1:1 bubs per gold, which is an insultingly low value. You can earn that many in 3 games at the start. But they will lock you out if you made the mistake of going all-in. The mode itself is basically a re-skin of their only other mode outside of ranked play, called Conquest.

I've defended their practices in the past, as they've been pretty good about making changes in accordance to feedback. But this pattern of money above all else is really wearing me thin. Every company wants to turn a profit, but when you manipulate your players at every turn to do so, it just becomes inexcusable. You cannot trust anything they sell is a good value, you have to know the systems inside and out, and that's a problem. It has reached the point where I feel this game does not appropriately value your time or your money, and for that reason I cannot recommend it to anyone, despite the gameplay itself being really good.

The addition of Deadpool Diner mode shows the shift toward gatcha greed mechanics for the game. The cost was already on the same level as MTG or Hearthstone but this creates a whole new level of cost for obtaining new costs that just isn't reasonable.

I'll be honest, i enjoy this game, but Second dinner is one of the, if not, the most greedy developers i ever seein, it's almost like some triple AAA greed.

If you want to play a normal tcg, please don't fall for this trap of a game, you will feel like "ah, it's easy to get cards" but no, it's only for the first tier 1 and tier 2, then you will get cards randomly on tier 3 and for the tier 4 and tier 5 you will need to wait for the developers to place it on some "gacha" system they have, were every 120 "level" YOU get a chance to pull for some of the 4 card of the weekly, 3 of them fixed, and the other completely random, OH, the random card has no dup system, you know? the thing every single tcg today has.

But hey, just get 120 "level" should be easy right? as a f2p myself i can only get 150 levels by playing weekly and doing my daily, every single day, and then i'll have a chance to get only ONE pull for the 3 fixed cards of the week or a random card, may i remind that there's no dup protection?

And no, i'm speaking with my heart when i say i'm a f2p player, i don't even buy battle passes, yes, this game has battle pass, and the battle pass give you a card that you can only get from the battle pass, then 3 months after, if the developers feels nice, they can place it on the fixed weekly "gacha" pull.

Also this game releases new cards every weekly, so you will feel overwhelmed if you aren't trying to get the card, if you get a weekly that one of the 3 fixed cards you already have, you will pull for then, but hey, it's a "card skin" but if you play it as a f2p you will never care about card skins, you want the new thing, not some skin for a card that you maybe don't like but you pulled it because it was on the "gacha" of the weekly.

If you want to still not care about my review, that's fine, you will enjoy this game for quite a while, but soon if you are not a Dolphin or a Whale, you will start to struggle to keep it up.