Fixing the Endless Copies of Card Games
I'm an avid card game player; so seeing developers take an interest into the genre really offers a lot of options for me when one game begins to get a little tiresome. I used to play a lot of Hearthstone, Pokemon TCGO, Magic: The Gathering, and now a little The Elder Scrolls: Legends.
The most recent card games to hit the market are incredibly lacking in innovations. Gameplay is always the same: you throw some cards down, slap the other cards with your cards, defeat your opponent. This is wasted potential in such a genre that boasts fantasy and depth in lore. That lore just never really seems to appear.
Card games need to make some changes if they want to stand the test of time. Such a basic form of gameplay cannot continue to exist. Simply adding new cards every few months isn't a solution, it's just temporary filler content to hide the existing gaps that make the game feel a little empty.
With such beautiful art and lore just sitting there waiting to be used, it's really a shock to see that almost no card games have decided to create beautiful animations that reflect the creatures and characters and the abilities they have. Where are the beautiful environments in which the creature or character bursts out of its card and onto a battlefield to use its abilities? Why must card games be restricted to a top-down view of a plain board with the prettiest features being the cards that lay on it?
Card games, in their current state, are limited to the beauty of the cards and their art, as well as their rarity. Although, that means absolutely nothing in a game in which all cards are digital and cannot be traded from one owner to another via an in-game market. That means that shiny little card you have holds no value whatsoever. It's just a few shiny pixels that makes the game's board and gameplay seem more appealing.
Honestly, the lack of in-game markets is my biggest annoyance in online card games. The ability to trade cards has always been the very foundations to card games; just take a look at the two biggest ones: Pokemon and Magic: The Gathering. Both games would most certainly not be where they are today if players did not have the ability to assign true value to the rarer cards by trading them with one another.