In a world dominated by fast-paced fighters and precision-heavy first-person shooters, card games reduce everything unnecessary and focus instead on the fundamental mechanics. The terms TCG (Trading Card Game) and CCG (Collectible Card Game) have become synonymous with the audience of the genre, so we’ll be ranking them together.
Collecting cards and building decks around them is therapeutic, and so is battling your wits out over a digital tabletop with other card connoisseurs. With such a wide variety of games, each with its own specific mechanics and gimmicks to choose from, here are the best card games on mobile!
8Yugioh Duel Links
If you want to get into Yugioh but have no idea where to do so, Duel Links is the perfect game for you. It’s a good way to learn about the rules and how the flow of the game works without overwhelming yourself with multiple decades worth of cards and mechanics.
The games are faster than normal Yugioh matches and have a lot fewer cards to keep track of. It also incorporates more elements of the Yugioh anime into its gameplay, letting you level up characters with flashy portraits. The game also hassomewhat of a Gacha feelto it, hosting numerous engaging events routinely.
7Yugioh Master Duel
Like our previous entry, Master Duel is another way for you to experience how Yugioh works without investing in the physical TCG. The game is more akin to what classic Yugioh matches look like, featuring a longer timespan for each match, and more than double the cards that Duel Links provides.
The game is also more F2P friendly, letting you disassemble cards you don’t want into base materials that you can then use to craft specific cards. The game can be a challenge if you’re not already aware of how Yugioh matches work, but it’s extremely fun to play once you get the hang of it.
6Marvel Snap
The best card games often have long matches, something you may not always prefer when playing games on your phone. Marvel Snap reinvents the genre by having you create a deck with no more than 12 cards, and matches lasting at most seven turns.
Not all Marvel Snap matches are about winning. The game features Cubes, which you can bet as a resource. Losing three single Cube matches is better than losing one with eight Cubes.
The game also incorporates elements from another popular mobile card game, Clash Royale, which features multiple lanes instead of a single enemy face to direct your attack towards. The game is extremely rewarding when you first get into it, though getting cards becomes a chore after you’ve invested a significant amount of time into it.
5Clash Royale
Like Marvel Snap, Clash Royale is tailor-made as a mobile CCG, and it’s certainly one of the more popular mobile games out there. The charmingly animated characters also make the game easier to pick up for a wider audience, and the simple-to-grasp gameplay is intuitive to even the most casual of gamers.
Unlike other card games, precise positioning and timing matter a lot in Clash Royale.
Each match takes place in real-time, opting out of turn-based combat entirely. You draw a new card immediately upon using one, and your elixir fills up passively. Clash Royale may be the most fast-paced game on the list, but it’s surprisingly relaxing to play.
4Shadowverse
Shadowverse is one of the most visually stunning card games out there, especially on mobile. Each in-game effect has its own gorgeously animated visual flair, and the character designs are a pleasure to look at. The game got so popular that the digital CCG got its own physical variation in Shadowverse: Evolve.
Apart from the beautiful art of the game, the gameplay is akin to traditional card games like Magic: The Gathering, albeit with an Anime twist to it. Each class is balanced and represents a trope common in RPGs, and each class has a plethora of decks and class-specific mechanics to utilize, with new cards being added to the game every patch.
3Hearthstone
Hearthstone is one of the oldest mobile TCGs that are still being played to this day, and for good reason. The game takes place in the World of Warcraft universe, letting you collect all your beloved characters and monsters in card form.
Hearthstone also features a robust campaign mode that is regularly updated, showing stories that take place in the ever-expansive world of WoW. Being on the market since 2014, the game includes an absurd amount of content, including different game modes and campaigns. The game’s one of the richest card games in terms of keeping things fresh.
2Legends of Runeterra
Riot’s card game takes League of Legends’s often-overlooked storytelling and turns it into an easy-to-digest card game format. Each card has an illustration representing a specific event in the story, making the game very rich in lore. The game’s addition to traditional card games is Spell Mana, a leftover Mana from the previous turn that you can use to cast spells.
Instead of classes, LoR lets you play cards from two separate regions, each with its own diverse cast of Champion cards.
Players draw cards at the start, being able to mulligan any that they dislike. Then, players take turns blocking or dealing damage to the enemy using abilities seen in League of Legends. The game focuses more on single-player content now, but there are a variety of cards released over the years to still engage in player vs. player combat.
1Magic: The Gathering Arena
Magic is perhaps the most popular and well-liked card game by fans of the genre. For the longest time, there was no good way to play the game digitally, until Magic: The Gathering Arena came out. While still not perfect, the game does an amazing job of replicating the feel of physical MTG matches without slowing down or complicating the combat too much.
The game follows a similar turn-by-turn combat scheme as Hearthstone or Legends of Runeterra but introduces location cards into the mix, which take the place of Mana Crystals. You have to manage this Mana very carefully, as not only can you play a single location card per turn, but this Mana is used by spells, creatures, and even creature abilities!
