Marvel Trading Card Game | Principal Platforms: Nintendo DS, PC, PSP | Developer: Vicious Cycle Software, 1st Playable Productions, Engine Software | Publisher: Konami | Genre: Card Game | Year: 2007

Marvel Trading Card Game PC Box Art

Marvel Trading Card Game

You could say that Konami was too ahead of the curve with Marvel Trading Card Game. This weakly-named adaptation of Upper Deck’s Vs. System arrived one year before the Iron Man movie and seven years ahead of Hearthstone; the most influential digital card game of modern times.

Konami’s head start returned little success as shortly after its first anniversary, support for Marvel Trading Card Game ended with its online modes, store front, and web-based community all being phased out in due time.

That Upper Deck Entertainment would soon discontinue the paper CCG is telling of Vs. System’s wider fortunes. This collectible card game brought together duelling superheroes from both Marvel and DC Comics (as well as an appearance from Hellboy). It had huge potential and yet for many players it seems the effort didn’t click. For all of its attempts to be unique, Vs. System sometimes comes across as a flawed Magic: The Gathering clone and when you also consider its fiddly phase-driven rules and inconsistent artwork, it’s perhaps clearer why it never enjoyed greater success.

There are many shared concepts between Vs. System and Magic: The Gathering. The goal is still to knock out the opposing player, deployable heroes and villains possess similar keywords and attributes, and you’ll find colour-coded cards representing everything from locations and equipment to battlefield tactics and famous franchise events.

The complex rules and intricate card synergies are faithfully translated and typical strategies involve one or two different factions of characters. Build a deck featuring the X-Men to get a strong synergy with recovery and location cards. The Sinister Syndicate enjoy a more aggressive approach derived from many cheap and powerful characters, whereas the Kang Council lets players dodge the uniqueness rule by playing the same copies of villain without penalty. It’s impressive because despite only having the one comic book license to work with, Marvel Trading Card Game has substantial variety and it feels reasonably balanced inside its own little meta.

Marvel Trading Card Game Gameplay Screenshot

These long-winded combat animations can be disabled, thankfully.

Each version of the game comes with the same lengthy story mode featuring different encounters and challenges that players approach in a linear order. The difficulty level remains pretty high when starting out, and with two different stories to tackle (one for heroes and one for villains), only expert players will achieve 100% completion. The steep challenge is compounded by one insanely hard final boss who makes huge demands of your skill and deck-building acumen.

The single player mode has a card shop where players use points to purchase randomised booster packs. It’s painful when the card you want is in a booster pack you haven’t yet unlocked for purchase, but it is a feature that keeps you engaged throughout the story as you constantly tweak decks with the drip feed of new and increasingly dynamic cards.

There are no deck-building restrictions with regards to factions, so whether it’s the hero or villain story mode, the game lets you use whatever cards you want. The Marvel Comics license offers a wealth of characters and storylines to draw upon, so you’re bound to find a deck theme suiting your tastes.

If the purpose of this game was to gently introduce new players to the CCG system though, then Marvel Trading Card Game is a failure. Like many collectible card games, the Vs. System has no shortage of obtuse rules and complex card interactions. The original designers’ consideration of things like positioning and adjacency is commendable, but Marvel Trading Card Game does a poor job of making these vital rules intuitive. No matter what version of the game you play, the built-in tutorial is not very comprehensive and the frustrating lack of an undo button leads to frequent mistakes that you have no opportunity to correct.

Team attacks will often fail because of their easy-to-forget requirements and the behaviour of characters on the support row will also regularly catch new players out. Success in a CCG like this can so easily rest on the outcome of a singular moment and because of the phase-orientated design, players can often miss their cue when looking to play the one card that will make or break their game. The multiple phases also cause things to operate slowly. You can enable options for automatically skipping redundant phases, only then you’ll find the problem with missing cues to be even worse, to the point where certain cards become entirely unplayable!

Another problem is that everything lacks sparkle. The animated cutscenes are merely serviceable and the artwork for each card is curiously inconsistent with some characters looking great and others looking terrible. The cards sometimes have a compressed look to them (mainly on the portable versions) and for every colourful picture of Spider-Man you’ll also find some obscure and grainy-looking character where it’s not even clear who or what you’re being shown.

These presentation foibles contribute to the game’s feeling of impenetrability. The puzzles that accompany each chapter are a superb inclusion for instance, but novice players will be completely stumped by their intense difficulty. Likewise is the deck editor which feels unfriendly regardless of which format you’re playing on. Especially annoying are the plot twist cards that commonly have faction-specific effects that can’t be sorted. And only giving players five deck slots is absolutely criminal.

Marvel Trading Card Game Gameplay Screenshot

One minor highlight is the music which is actually quite varied and cool. The main menu theme is obnoxiously loud and heroic-sounding though.

Even though the PC version runs in a fixed window, it’s easily the most attractive of the three versions. The PlayStation Portable version has nice graphics and sound, but its cramped viewing space, excessive loading times, and artwork the size of postage stamps hurts it a lot. The Nintendo DS version is much faster being on cartridge and its second screen is very handy for viewing card effects and booster pack contents in their entirety. The compressed art assets and cramped deck editor and playing space are even more pronounced on DS, however, and the music loses a lot of its clarity as well.

The PSP and PC versions once featured cross platform play that integrated with Konami’s online community. This was supported by paid booster packs and again, this is something that the DS version was never integrated with. This mode would either have been a fascinating boon or a ludicrous money-sink depending on your own personal attitude towards premium content, but considering the service’s short lifespan, it didn’t turn out to be a very big deal in the end.

The handheld versions maintain their local play via Wi-Fi to this day, though no version supports card swapping between players. Seeing as how “trading card game” is in the name and all, this was a massively stupid oversight, especially when you consider Card Fighters Clash was realising this concept nearly eight years prior on inferior hardware.

The lack of trading puts a big dampener on the multiplayer component and with the online services now kaput, the game remains an unattractive prospect for returning players. Whilst the CPU-controlled AI is far from clever though, their diverse decks make the single player mode worth playing still, and the sheer number of gameplay hours here saves Marvel Trading Card Game from sliding into complete irrelevance.

Without the DC Comics version that fans briefly dreamed of, the package feels limited. It’s still a faithful rendition of an experts-only CCG though and it’s one that defunct multiplayer modes can’t entirely deplete of enjoyment either.

Was this a game too soon? With the paper Vs. System recently being resurrected, perhaps that dream digital card duel between Spider-Man and Superman can one day still happen.