Growing up, I had a friend who was very into the Star Wars Customizable Card Game. He carried two binders with him throughout the fifth grade: one for his school work and one for all of his cards. I don't know if he actually played it with other people -- I certainly didn't know of anyone else at school who was into it -- but he loved to break that binder out at lunch to show us all the new cards he'd bought over the weekend. If YouTube was a thing back when we were kids, he'd probably have a channel of nothing but him opening booster packs that makes $125,000 a year.
I didn't get the appeal of collectible card games, and as I grew up and was introduced to more of them, that opinion didn't change. But in 2004, I started to soften to the idea of playing a game built around collecting cards and managing decks. That was the year Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories came out, and while I know its battle system is a major point of contention, it grabbed me hook, line, and sinker. I loved going through the menus trying to assemble the best deck possible, and out of that game, I found myself ready to give the genre a go. Or, at the very least, a video game version of it.
Unfortunately, the first two games I played were SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighters DS and Marvel Trading Card Game. Nothing will turn a newcomer away from card games faster than something as shitty as those titles. Whatever goodwill in the genre Chain of Memories planted in me was dead by the time I gleefully traded them into GameStop for $2.
I have, in recent years, opened myself up to collectible card games once more with Shadowverse on my iPad. That game has let me dip my toes back into the genre without committing a lot of time or money, and it's provided a sufficient amount of enjoyment. It's allowed me to be a casual fan of card games, but after this past month, I think I'm ready to dive headfirst into the deep end. Because in 2021, I played Pokémon Trading Card Game for the first time, and all I'm wondering is what the hell took me so long?
