My Magic: The Gathering playing days are long gone and even if I do sometimes cast a nostalgic eye on an exciting new release like the recent Shadowmoor, I know in my heart of hearts that I will never again have the patience and freedom to buy entire boxes of boosters for the thrill of opening them one by one, build up networks of friends to trade cards and play games with and spend countless hours fine-tuning decks and analyzing strategies. So when I bought my PSP, it was with the knowledge that there are a number of well-received collectible card games available on the platform, and the Marvel Trading Card Game was at the top of the list to try out.

The Marvel TCG is a direct adaptation of the card based equivalent that uses Upper Deck’s Versus system. I’ve heard of this system but I’ve never actually learned to play it before this, so I had to go through the included tutorials not just to learn the interface but to understand how the system works as well. The tutorials do a decent job of teaching the fundamentals, but it’s likely that the average player will still need to actually jump into a game proper and learn about the quirks and subtleties of the system by playing the game and observing the available options.

The great thing about the Marvel TCG is that, between the comics and the recent slew of movie adaptations, many of the characters are instantly recognizable and hence appealing. This is a good thing because as you might expect from a straight up video game adaptation of a CCG, there is certain lack of visual pizazz otherwise. The game needs all of the screen space of the PSP to show all sorts of information, and even some of the important information, such as which phase the turn is in and the current stack of played but unresolved effects, is compressed into little icons that can be difficult to see and utterly confusing to people not used to CCGs.

After playing with it for a while, I found the Versus system to be fairly robust and straightforward. The gameplay mostly revolves around putting characters into play and duking it out against the opponent’s characters. The action takes place on a simple battlefield in which characters can be placed either in the front row or in the rear supporting row and there are rules to determine what the valid attack options are. For example, characters with only melee attacks can only attack if they are placed in the front row but characters with ranged attacks can attack irregardless of their position. Equipment cards can be attached to characters to make them more powerful or give them additional abilities, while Plot Twist cards play something like the instants of MTG, creating surprising but short term effects.

Where the Marvel TCG is arguably superior to MTG is that any cards may be played face-down to the table as resource cards. This avoids MTG‘s problem of players occasionally being mana screwed if they fail to draw enough land cards at the beginning of the game, but it does make the power progression of the game very predictable: since you can play any card as a resource card at the beginning of every turn, you know for sure that character cards with a resource cost of, say, 6, will show up on turn 6.

The single player campaign in this PSP version gives the player the choice of whether to play as a superhero or as a super villain, but other than the story progression and cutscenes in between each battle, there is little difference between the two. You can, for example, incorporate super villain cards into a superhero deck even while playing the superhero campaign without penalty. It does make the plot progression feel a little weird to be fielding Sinister Six characters in a battle in which you’re supposed to be playing as Cyclops of the X-Men fighting against the Mutant Brotherhood, but I suppose that there’s no help for that. Winning every battle awards a number of points that can be used to purchase additional boosters with which to flesh out your decks.

My one major complaint is that the single player campaign is probably too long and doles out too few new cards in between each battle, so that accumulating points to buy lots of boosters in the hopes of getting some useful cards that you’d actually want to use feels too much like grinding. This also has the effect that you’ll probably end up playing your starter deck for quite a long while which is extremely frustrating when you want to experiment with an entirely different set of characters and strategies. The fact that character combat is really the meat of the game, lacking the huge variety of options available in MTG, also means that the average gamer will probably get bored of the basic gameplay long before they finish the campaign. It’s fun to try different cards out but ultimately there’s no substitute to being the owner of the biggest, baddest character on the board in the Marvel TCG.

AI-wise the game does a decent job of challenging the player even if it does make some obvious mistakes, in particular, being too quick to use all of the powers and options available to it rather than saving them for a more opportune moment. It’s rather amusing to see it play The Power Cosmic, for example, which destroys all of its resources in return for gaining the initiative this turn, when it has only one single puny character in play. It should be noted that the AI plays with decks that were obviously pre-made by the designers , which might make their decks more focused than the player who is restricted to the limited pool of cards won through normal gameplay.

My final verdict: give this game a whirl if you’re already a CCG fan, and doubly so if you’re a Marvel one as well, but everyone else will probably want to give this one a pass.