Marvel Trading Card Game with Gen Moonen (“Fun” & Games)

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>Let’s just say it up front: turning a trading card game into a video game is a magic trick where the “trading” and the “card” both quietly slip out the back door, leaving you with a menu that goes “ding” when you win. And Marvel decided this was worth doing not once, but on two separate handhelds that weren’t even talking to each other, like a superhero team-up where nobody checked who else was showing up.

Somewhere, someone looked at the specific joy of slapping a foil Spider-Man card down on a table hard enough to rattle the juice boxes, and said: what if we replaced that with a stylus tap? What if deck-building, the sacred art of jamming eighty cards into a rubber band and hoping for the best, became a scroll menu instead? Visionary. Extremely quiet. Nobody’s little brother has ever stormed off in a rage over a scroll menu.

Dealing me in for this one is Gen Moonen, co-host of the “Fun” & Games Podcast alongside Matt Storm, a show built entirely around two people who genuinely, unapologetically love games, which honestly should be a requirement for every gaming podcast and somehow still isn’t.

So grab a deck, or a controller, or whatever the modern version of “shuffle and pray” is, and let’s find out if Marvel Trading Card Game is a genuinely good time, or a lesson in why some hobbies were never meant to leave the kitchen table.

Learn such things as:

Is it as satisfying to play an amazing card in the game as it is to play that card in real life?

Does it bother anyone that the winner of the fight is at least partly decided by random number generation?

How is it even possible to get a story going when nobody can know what you’ll be able to do later in the game?

And so much more!

You can find Gen on BlueSky @gnoisegenerator.bsky.social, on Instagram @gnoisegenerator, her podcast “Fun” & Games, and her own website GenMoonen.com.

If you want to be a guest on the show please check out the Be a A Guest on the Show page and let me know what you’re interested in.