B. Patrick
In the recent past, the general population has gravitated to games with some of the simplest concepts. Whether your game/drug of choice was Angry Birds, Candy Crush or even Minecraft, you have games that the briefest description would make you re-think the amount of time one spent playing.
“So you spent how many hours throwing various birds at different structures containing evil and dumb pigs?”
“No, it isn’t like that, they were dressed like Star Wars!”
Personally, I’ve found ways to avoid some of these crazes. I’ve dabbled with the free version Angry Birds on my iPad here and there. I’ve done some co-op Minecraft with my buddy on Xbox Live but god help me if I got punching a cow for leather on my own.
The worst of these for me was most likely Hexic HD on Xbox Live. For those unfamiliar, the game is like a Bejeweled/ Tetris fusion that can easily lend itself to be played for hours on-end without realizing it.
On August 14th, 2014, 2K Sports and the WWE unleashed a dangerous drug to the wrestling fans with passing gaming interest in the world.
WWE Supercard was out for a few months before it started consuming the little pockets of free time in my life. I didn’t download initially, as I never really do a ton of apps or games with my phone. But I heard it was fun, so I decided to check it out and kept going.
For those unfamiliar with the game, the title SuperCard is pretty spot on. Users collect cards of different WWE Superstars. Each one has a different balance of Power, Speed, Toughness and Charisma. When the deck calls for a battle of Speed and Charisma, you are going to want to reach for your Daniel Bryan card instead of channeling your inner Eric Bischoff and automatically summoning KAAAANNNNNEEEE.
The player keeps a deck of cards but in standard exhibition, the user pre-sets their lineup of their top four Superstars and top Diva. Your excess cards can be saved for training your card to be even stronger and if you have your card as strong as can be, by feeding cards and pairing with a matching card (before feeding again), don’t worry- you have tiers!
With Common, Uncommon, Rare, Super Rare, Ultra Rare, Epic, Legendary and Survivor, you can have various levels of power to your Superstars. Most cards get cooler as they go on.
For instance, a Common (man) Dusty Rhodes looks like Dusty circa 2007 Randy Orton bullrope feud, whereas an Ultra Rare Dusty gives him Polka Dots he can be thankful for year-round.
Pretty straight forward – which is what lead to me playing this round the clock. After each win, you draw another card and I just had to update my deck.
What started with winning off of a team of Rare R-Truth and Rare Jey Uso has escalated into participating in the now weekly events to get super-powered Roman Reigns and Bad News Barrett cards that normally drawn cards cannot compete with.
The King of the Ring mode lets the player enter eight superstars and two divas into a multi-day tournament to get higher prizes. These can be done in the background of regular play.
Supercard features the freemium game styling that sucks the player in. Much like the recent episode of South Park featuring Stan getting addicted to spending on these things, I found myself in the same conundrum during the Christmas day release of the Road to Glory game feature.
I never paid money and watched people accumulate difficult cards by spending money in big events. Road to Glory, an event for 20 cards – your top 16 superstars and top 4 divas – lead the player to work through tiers with reward cards of each tier. When I got so far into getting the overpowered Surfer Era Sting card, I gave in and bought credit.
The Road to Glory stirred a lot of controversy in the Supercard community due to essentially any player with a lot of time or money during the four day event wound up with the super-powered card, watering down the game when virtually every opponent threw this card out.
Two weeks later, the game did a competition for WWE’s newest chosen son, Roman Reigns. The competition got much, much stiffer and led to an equal amount of complaints of the reward-driven tournament getting too tough.
Folks like me, who held firm on not spending money, dropped money again. Now, I haven’t done as much as I’ve seen some people spending but the credit packs I am buying are definitely more than I pay on these things, as I just want my deck to get better and this happens to the best way.
Days after the Roman Reigns event, the community was shocked as instead of the standard People’s Champion event that typically only gives the top rewards to five players worldwide, the developers announced a Bad News Barrett Road to Glory – making it come up before people fully had their twenty card decks prepared. Players who don’t spend an excessive amount of time on the game who were fortunate enough to get Roman may not have fully had one of their new star cards ready to go.
As of this writing, the Barrett Road to Glory is underway and like the other Road to Glory events, is stirring up a great deal of discussion. Some folks see the competition getting even more difficult than the previous events. In the push to get the last card in the event, the challenge level gets extremely hard and it has been noted that blatant developer maintained bots have entered the game, as profiles such as IamTheGame, who sports a 0-0 record, happens to have some of the exclusive “1 of 5” in the world cards, among a plethora of other cards powered beyond what players with even 1,000 games under their belt would have.
The Barrett card itself is a nice card in looks and features. The Power, Toughness and Charisma is floating right around the almighty Venice Beach Sting and Roman Reigns cards, however, the speed is right on par with the speed of the lesser card of Fandango, released around this event.
All wrestling fans would agree, in the real world Fandango would probably beat our favorite deliverer of Bad News in a foot race but you do have to think twice that a card requiring most people to spend money to obtain should be a bit more dominant than a card that while being in a top tier, is a midlevel card of a guy in the midlevel of the midcard.
While there are some genuine gripes and I find myself getting a little too frustrated at a silly game that helps pass small bursts of free time (who am I kidding, at times I go hours on end…), Supercard keeps me sucked in.
Something for the gamer in me, something for the collector in me, all tied around my interests in pro wrestling past, present and future, I am going to cut the article for now, so I can go get myself the second Bad News Barrett.
Enjoy your game and if you are in exhibition, a King of the Ring, on the Road to Glory or fighting to be People’s Champion, my tag is MrMuffinsLuvsU and I would love for you to come at me, bro! Maybe by then, I’ll have some Bad News waiting for you.
