It's Critter Time!

Anyone in here like TCGs? Pokemon, Magic, Yugioh, Vanguard it dont matter. What are some of your favorites? Im mostly a Magic player but ive dabbled in Yugioh and Vanguard a bit.

Vanguard has been particularly fun, wish there were better ways to play it with friends though.

I've considered getting into Pokemon a few times, but I've had problems even finding cards. Every time I go somewhere that claims to have them they're completely sold out.

We got one of those vending machines installed in the local department store a month ago and I've never seen it stocked with anything.

Local friends I woulda played with stopped playing for the same reason. People stopped going to the local TCG weekly because people would show up and buy out all the stock so no one could draft or anything.

It's a weird, wild time.

Yeah I enjoyed Pokemon as a card game but scalpers made it impossible to keep up with anything remotely close to the meta.

I'm primarily a MTG player myself, these days really enjoying a lot of EDH & pauper! Would love to get some folks together to play sometime if there's any interest over something like TTS, Cockatrice, or Spelltable!

In general though I'm also just fond of card games of all stripes! Flesh & Blood has been interesting to get into, Vanguard is something I only have cursory experience with thanks to the demo of Dear Days, YGO and me don't necessarily get along but I can see the appeal. I also have a lot of interest in dead card games, been exploring those with a partner a lot over the last few years!

I used to play the Pokemon TCG as a kid, and the TCGP app coming out recently kinda got me in the mood to get back into it again.

Unfortunately it's basically the worst time to do that because...

Trysdyn wrote: Fri Jul 18, 2025 9:49 pm I've considered getting into Pokemon a few times, but I've had problems even finding cards. Every time I go somewhere that claims to have them they're completely sold out.

Yeah, scalping on Pokemon cards has been seriously bad for the last several releases. The only way my local card shop has kept them in stock is to essentially do the same themselves and charge 2× more than standard retail price, and I've still seen folks go in and buy them by the dozens.

I’ll play basically anything once, and right now there’s a ton of cool games in print!

• Flesh and Blood is my main game—-really cool 1v1 battles where you “pitch” cards from hand to pay costs (and then they go on the bottom of your deck), so you never get screwed on mana/energy. It feels like the momentum and spirit of a console fighting game without the overly literal interpretation of something like UFS/Universus or BattleCON. (I play Florian. Love my dirty boi.)
• I also play Sorcery: Contested Realms, a 90’s-styled unit-basher where you also play the field underneath you and move on a 5x4 grid, so tactical movement and carefully cornering your opponent for a checkmate is crucial to winning
• I love the gameplay of One Piece, even if I’ve never seen the show! The Don resource system is genuinely brilliant—-even if you have nothing in hand, you can always drop all your Don on your leader card and swing a big single attack, and I think basically every game should do something like this
• I really wanna try Elestrals, which seems like a neat half-step between Pokémon and Yugioh, a unit-basher about allocating your elemental spirits that compose your summons
• I also have starters for Altered, a nonviolent PvP game about trying to have your two expedition teams meet in the center first… but I still haven’t been able to play it yet
• Someone once handed me starters for Dream Book, which is beautifully amateurish cardboard kusoge. It’s dripping with love, if not any particular artistic or design skill, lmfao
• I’m also keeping my eye on Neuroscape, which is mostly MtG in a funny cyberpunk hat but has some kick-ass art. Similarly the Gundam Card Game has some amazing art and really stylish card frames that I’ve found super visually inspiring
• And then on top of all of that there’s the Final Fantasy TCG that I still wanna try and I’m pretty sure I’m legally required to mention Netrunner

I love cardboard, and if you only play one game, you should totally find something else and give it a shot! There’s SO much other cool stuff out there right now!

gardevoir wrote: Fri Jul 18, 2025 10:11 pm

• Flesh and Blood is my main game—-really cool 1v1 battles where you “pitch” cards from hand to pay costs (and then they go on the bottom of your deck), so you never get screwed on mana/energy. It feels like the momentum and spirit of a console fighting game without the overly literal interpretation of something like UFS/Universus or BattleCON. (I play Florian. Love my dirty boi.)
• I also play Sorcery: Contested Realms, a 90’s-styled unit-basher where you also play the field underneath you and move on a 5x4 grid, so tactical movement and carefully cornering your opponent for a checkmate is crucial to winning
• I really wanna try Elestrals, which seems like a neat half-step between Pokémon and Yugioh, a unit-basher about allocating your elemental spirits that compose your summons
• I also have starters for Altered, a nonviolent PvP game about trying to have your two expedition teams meet in the center first… but I still haven’t been able to play it yet
• Someone once handed me starters for Dream Book, which is beautifully amateurish cardboard kusoge. It’s dripping with love, if not any particular artistic or design skill, lmfao
• I’m also keeping my eye on Neuroscape, which is mostly MtG in a funny cyberpunk hat but has some kick-ass art.
  
  I love cardboard, and if you only play one game, you should totally find something else and give it a shot! There’s SO much other cool stuff out there right now!

Oh wow there are a few of these I never even heard of before. Thats really interesting. Ill need to look into these.

I'm a simple cat, my brain is YGO wired after having been properly introduced to it by one of my ex and a few of my close friends lol

Started on Master Duel and instantly beelined towards Pendulum and Link monsters even though I was told NOT to and had a blast/it sold me fully to it lol

MD's fun but then I went learning about Omega and that thing's kinda crazy and cool, nice lil crossplatform fanmade launcher which is surprisingly well made and nearly looking like an actual piece of official content.
Free stuff, easy lobbies options and a few alt formats (tried Goat Format and that stuff was kinda crazy, still pondering trying Edison since I heard it's another VERY good one that still has its meta shifting around).
Also Omega supports having sidedecks, which is a thing MD doesn't do and I feel I'd need to give a shot trying actual matches with sidedecking to spice things up, sounds nice having counterpick options between rounds.

Link here for anyone curious
https://omega.duelistsunite.org/

The Pokemon TCG was my gateway into card games, I mostly play Magic but I dabble in Yugioh and the latest Digimon TCG as well :3

I’ve been playing quite a bit of Pokémon Pocket TCG and have only recently managed to acquire every main card from the Eevee Grove set!…Still need to get that one animated card from it though, and my luck is being a pain in the abdomen. —w—;;

I never really played TCGs while growing up, and it was after some encouragement from one of my partners, I have been trying them out as something fun to do with them, but Poke Pocket TCG is maybe the first one I’m actually sinking hours into.

I did try Yu-Gi-Oh before Poke Pocket came along, being someone who was a fan of the anime as a child. It was unfortunately though a game I just had a reeeeally hard time following along and trying to remember what works with what, knowing what certain cards do, etc. I can see why though so many folks love it, and it’s fun to watch my partner and friends play it, but it’s a lot to keep track of at times. The more straightforward card functions in Poke TCG are the main reason I tend to gravitate to it instead. At the same time, I have notice I do admittedly tend to focus way more on card collecting than PvP a lot of the time I’ve noticed. XXD

I'm an ex-Magic player, got out of the game proper around the time Avacyn Restored originally launched.

I'm more in the market for new experiences. Gardevoir up above plays most of the same stuff I do (considering we live together, it kind of just makes sense?) We've also got experiences with a few other games too worth mentioning for, if nothing else, how novel they are.

Force of Will TCG: What if MtG, but as anime and also Grimm Tales nonsense. Five colors, four copies of cards, tap resources to play, et cetera... the major differences are you pick a Ruler that informs your deck creation, except by way of abilities instead of color restrictions a la Commander. And it has a separate deck for your resource base, no getting land screwed like in MtG. It's fun to get away from MtG, but hoo boy, this game has no idea how to make cards LEGIBLE. They seem to redesign the card borders every other set, and they just become harder to read.

Keyforge: Richard Garfield went and decided to make a game that auto-generates entire decks based on an algorithm. Very weird game, as previously mentioned, you don't even build your decks. You buy an entire deck as a booster pack type product. You're left almost entirely at the mercy of what you pull. They introduced newer formats later that let you tweak decks, but the primary focus seemed to be just bashing these randomized decks together. Flavorwise, it's kind of just a mess. A bunch of different factions, all based around a theme. There's space aliens, there's your typical paladin faction, a bunch of bruisers... but it's all kind of nonsense since you can't really influence deck construction normally. I kind of recommend passing on this, in all honesty, but it's worth trying once!

I just tried the new Digimon TCG with my partner and first impressions were very positive. Very clever solutions for win conditions and good mechanics to encourage digivolving. Probably gonna play it more with her.

Ive played a bit of the Digimon TCG and I liked what I played. At the end of the day though I always come back to Magic. Its the combination of nice readable card text and interesting interaction mechanics.

I'm at a stage where I refuse to give WotC or Hasbro any more money, they already effectively will exist forever, and I don't have to add to that.

I think that's honestly beyond fair as an approach to it. I'm here for the wide variety of experiences, which is why I'll definitely try any card game at least once.

But for sure I want to get more into FAB and try out Digimon, both due to enjoying Digimon and FAB clicking with my brain in a very intriguing way. Gets you to really consider your sequencing, which I always find rewarding.

I also occasionally look into the dead card game Hecatomb, unique for plastic pentagonal cards that you "stitch" to each other to create abominations. It was cut short due to production costs, but I still find what could've been super intriguing.