First, I'm a comic book dork as well as a person who has, well a disposition to gambling. That's a lot of wells there. As to this gambling, I mean in the sport card packs/ collectible games type of gambling. I love opening Upper Deck hockey cards knowing there is a chance I can get that 1 out of 1000 pack signed Patrick Kane card. Or buying 10 boxes of Mage Knight figures trying to get that super rare Solonavi figure. Well these freemium games are just like that. Even though they are free to play, to be able to win, do well, etc., it's likely that you will be required to spend money to do so. And it's likely you will have to spend lots of money. Here were my very mighty cards when I was at the top of my game:
Nice team, Iron Man, Thor, Ghostrider, Captain America and Invisible Woman. Three Ultra Legendary Cards in my deck!
The Marvel game is at heart, a card game, albeit electronic cards. To get cards that have good abilities, you have to buy card packs ("CP"). These CP are expensive and the odds of getting good cards are so poor that it really is like trying to win a jackpot on a Five-Timer slot machine. The packs are usually some crazy amount like 3 bucks for a card. Some are even 20 bucks for like 5 cards. Each CP typically features a new, really powerful card and the rest is pretty much crap. Here's an example of what a CP looks like:
Nice. A really impossible to get Mystique. Well this one isn't so hard to get. You are guaranteed to get her after you buy 10 10-dollar packs. 100 bucks...
You pay the money for the CP... And then you get your cards like this:
Not a great card, but better than most of the crap you get.
She's hot. Can you guess the crowd they aim for with these cards?
If you get a good card, you are featured on the main CP page with the details of when you get the good card. It's just like when the casinos put pictures of jackpot winners on the walls. Here's an example of when I got a pretty decent card:
Mr. Gambit to be played by Tatum Channing in yet another Marvel movie next year.
So what do you do with the cards you ask? There are different events that rotate each month but each involves using your cards for a goal such as fighting others in a war in an alliance, using a deck to fight giant bosses in a raid and coop in teams at times and other events. You build a defense deck and an offense deck. Here is a victory I had using my offense deck. I crushed some other guy's defense deck.
That Former Enemies was my favorite card of all time. I miss it.
This is amazing. At one point I was in the 7th best alliance in the world (for this game). It's name is Guerilla Warfare. Great guys. So one thing great about WOH is the people you meet. I'll talk more about this later. In GW we had 40 members and consistently communicated on the Line app. You get to know people by their screen names and as per the WOH rules, we are not supposed to share personal information. In that sense, like heroes, we all had secret identities. Everyone just knew me as... Popsghostly. Here is our ranking after one war...
That's nuts. 7th in the world!
So along with cards, something called power packs, or, PP, are very powerful. The more PP you use, the more you can attack. Since real money trading is not allowed in the game, PP, which is tradeable, has become the in game currency. So you can trade a valuable card for like 4000PP. You can buy PP from the WOH store, which is like 50PP for 20 bucks. You can also buy PP from others on the black market. It's much much more cheaper there. As a matter of course, trading for a card with PP is a much better deal than trying to get it via CP. There is a market for cards and it is on the Line app. During my heyday, I was in like 70 trade rooms where posters post cards for sale. There are even auction rooms.
Cold hard...PP
Typical market post
As to trading, thievery is rampant. The makers of the game know this, so they specifically disclaim any liability for trading in their rules. You can only trade with people in your alliance and 50 teammates. That's like 90 people in total. You can somewhat get around this by having multiple accounts. Also, you can drop teammates and add ones to facilitate trading, but unfortunately, there is a 2-week trade ban. So people resort to having middlers, i.e., I trade with a teammate who is connected to another teammate who is connected to another teammate and so on. I was involved in a trade once with 9 people. That is where cards are stolen. Thieves strike on a weekly basis and you'll see posts warning about a certain thief in trade rooms. The thief then just closes his account, and starts another one. It's terrible and a reason you should only use middlers you trust.
So what happened? I was reading the Daily Herald on its app one day in like April 2013 and an ad for Marvel WOH was on the bottom of the screen. I clicked on it, downloaded the game, and the rest was history. Sadly, I became addicted to the game, and at times, put it in front of the things I loved the most, my family and friends. So this is a confession of sorts and an apology. I also put the game in front of important things like improving my Japanese and... working on this blog! Another terrible part of the game is that I spent lots of money on it. Lots of money. (At least I was able to get a lot back when I retired. I'll explain that later). Getting shitty cards in CP, which is the norm, put me in a really bad mood. So I'm apologizing for that too. Once a many times, I rushed home and ignored my family because it was my one-hour slot with the shared deck. Or I skipped breakfast with the family because we had a war for my alliance at 7am on a Saturday (the time difference was tough because most of my friends and ally mates were in the States or Europe so they were playing at completely opposite times than me). In sum, I really wish I had that year and a half back. I'm happy that my family and friends have taken me back (I hope).
But there are some positives. I did make some really good friends in the game, people I still talk to. So a quick shout-out to Draxx, Hulk, Jmil, Thad, Batman and Steven. In fact, Draxx suggested that I reach out to the blog followers and explain my absence. I broke the WOH rules and had coffee with Batman in real life and saw, naturally, Guardians of the Galaxy, a Marvel flick, with Jmil last summer. And if I have the time, I'll definitely hang out with these guys in the future. Also the trade rooms are flooded with memes. This is one of the favorite ones I found. Hilarious...
Tough luck for Seattle fans.
So what lead to my retirement? Well, I wanted to be closer to my family and improve my Japanese and work on the blog again. Really good reasons. I think they like me much better now.
Also, my retirement was due to the cards themselves. WOH keeps on making more and more powerful cards. At one point, I realized that I just couldn't keep up any longer. Further, it is the nature of the cards themselves. Unlike a Michael Jordan rookie card, these cards are not tangible objects- they are just files. But worst of all, you don't really own anything. Pursuant to the WOH TOS (rules), all you have is a license to to play WOH, a license which gives you the right to use their cards. They are not even your cards! At one point I actually started researching whether there were cases acknowledging propriety interests in the cards (or other virtual items for say a game like Warcraft) beyond the license, but as of late 2014, I didn't find anything on point. Pursuant to the TOS, WOH can just close up shop and you would have no redress for your lost cards.
This is a real Marvel card from the physical card game Overpower... As to realness... Her proportions are not.
In the last month, I traded all of my cards for PP and then sold the PP. I was able to recover enough of my investment to, well, buy airfare for a family of four to somewhere far, far away. I get my family and time back, make some good friends and go on a nice vacation, so this does have a happy ending after all.
Thanks for the read, and really glad to be back.
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