What is the best digital trading card game?
 

For me I think it's Hearthstone. Magic the Gathering is way too expensive.

Problem I have with those, Is they all cost money.

MTG on untap.in is the king IMO.

Untap is a little clunky at first and it's pretty laggy, But other than that. It's the best way to play magic, It's free, Lots of games going all the time. Hell, I can even invite you to play with us sometime lol.

Buying the game is not a problem. Buying the cards, that is a problem... And MTG is very expensive. Hearthstone is alright, I've heard, and simpler to play.

MTG is very expensive, Yes. When I play in person I use proxies. But like I said, Untap is free, The cards are free, You just build your deck with whatever and BAM, You can play the game.

I would never spend those prices on cardboard, Or even digital cardboard.

I liked hearthstone, played it from its 1st expansion all the way up to a little after they came out with hero classes. Probably dumped close to $500-$1k lifetime on packs. But got a lot of entertainment from it. Being able to play on my phone anywhere was a blast

Not as interactive or complex as MTG though obv. And a good amount of RNG which could be really frustrating when it won the match on its own for an opponent. But even with ridic RNG swings, as more total games were played, the more skilled players tended to rise to the top

The problem with hearthstone is that it did get too expensive for me. Sure you could build a T2 or T1 aggro deck that could be competitive for free. But you would lose your mind from boredom playing the same 30 card deck over and over forever. These are not as big of decks as MTG so their win methods are a bit more basic

However, if you had some money to spend on a variety of different decks and archetypes like a tiered deck for control, midrange, aggro, etc, of different classes, then the game was an absolute blast

So overall hearthstone was not as much of a P2W as it became a P2 have fun playing, and I didn’t want to keep spending more money

I have a pretty good collection up to when I quit though…

If I wanted to get into a digital card game, what is better MTG or Hearthstone or Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links perhaps? Those seem to be the top three right now. I gotta say I already played some Hearthstone on the PC, it is nice, but I never played WoW and not a big fan of it.

Is Hearthstone the ONLY game you can play on the smartphone? I didn't even know that. Does it work well on the phone?

Nah you can play MTG on phone, it’s called Arena. I play MTG commander format with actual cards with my cousins sometimes. Commander has basically taken over MTG as the most fun and popular format. On the phone I believe commander format is called “brawl”

MTG on the phone isn’t as user friendly or as aesthetic looking as hearthstone. There’s certain card combos which can create dozens and dozens of little 1/1 minions which the phone will try to clump into a square with a total number. But have a few different clumps of those on the board along with enchantments and artifacts and the screen can get pretty cluttered. My friend that played MTG arena on his phone had to use a stylus pen in order to select things, that’s not needed in hearthstone

My friend also played yugioh duel links on his phone and that seemed as user friendly and aesthetic looking as hearthstone. But I have no idea in terms of how fun or balanced it is

From what I hear from my friend who’s played MTG arena and hearthstone on phone, he says MTG arena you can have fun and be competitive the entire time for free. So I think that would be the one I recommend, if you can deal with how it looks (and maybe they’ve improved it since I had seen it a few years ago)

rip Cockatrice, you fought the good fight.

Before Cockatrice we used Apprentice and Magic Workstation. Playing MTG online used to have a very active scene, setting up matches in IRC. Sadly most people only want to play the Commander variant of the game anymore, hard to find other matches on Cockatrice.

Hearthstone doesn't cost much if you play it a lot, but that does require a big time commitment if you don't want to pay. I've only spent $120 on the game since 2014 and won more money than that over the years from tournaments. There are far less tournaments now, but I still play off-and-on and always get to top 100 legend if I feel like it.

Both games suffer from powercreep. MtG has more flavor, especially the older cards, and its concept could be used for a great MMORPG game, but its powercreep has also come with exhausting amounts of rules baggage and token/counter generation. Hearthstone games generally flow better, although there does tend to be annoying random effects that can be frustrating when it determines games. Overall MtG is still probably the better game, but I very rarely play it, because my very expensive collection was stolen and I have more attachment to how the game used to be, which makes its current form that much less enjoyable in comparison.

Since we live in a simulation.

MTG.

It was and is the best digital card game.

The actual, physical, version of MTG that you play inside this gigantic digital simulation we call the universe.