Do you collect Digital Cards?

Over the past few weeks I've been trying out the various digital trade card apps available on mobile phones. These aren't apps that track actual trading cards or let you remotely open packs of actual cards (like Upper Deck's e-pack site). With these apps, you collect digital trading cards within the app using the app's currency to buy packs. You can then buy, sell, and trade these cards, and win cards by playing games in the app.

Each sport has its own app, and they are either made by Topps or Panini. Topps makes Bunt, Skate, UFC, and Kick for baseball, hockey, MMA, and soccer, respectively. Panini makes Dunk and Blitz for basketball and football. Panini also has a digital version of their Adrenalyn soccer trading card game, which I tried only briefly and am not very familiar with.

By far the best apps are Topps Bunt, Panini Dunk, and Panini Blitz. The other apps aren't even worth trying.

Are these worth trying if you are a card collector? A bit, yes. It's not the same thing as collecting actual cards. The apps are more like mobile games that you might appreciate playing more as a card collector than you would if you did not collect cards. It doesn't replace collecting actual cards or anything like that, but if you are on the bus or waiting at the doctor's office or whatever and you want to play a mobile game and you enjoy collecting sports cards, you'll probably enjoy these apps.

There are also in-app purchases where you can use real money to purchase in-app currency, but it's not necessary to enjoy the apps and I don't recommend wasting your money.

Topps Bunt

I think this is the best app of all of them. Topps did a great job with Bunt. You earn coins by collecting missions, such as engaging in so many trades per day, or spinning the prize wheel so many times. You also get free coins every few hours, and also a free pack. You can trade with other users, and Topps has different themed sets released each week. Some of these sets have real life counterparts (Gypsy Queen) and some of them are totally made up (Vitality).

Bunt has a base set with multiple parallels. No matter which brand of packs you buy on the app, you end up with Bunt base cards, plus inserts from that particular brand. It would be like if Topps Series 1 base cards were just used as the base cards for all brands, and the hits were brand specific. 

There are a bunch of parallels for the base cards. What I like most about this app is the crafting function. Since you end up with so many base cards, you can craft two or more of them into a rarer parallel. Each parallel tier allows you to craft your doubles into a card the next tier up. The card you receive for crafting is random. God, I wish I could do that with actual base cards in real life.

The objective is mainly set collecting, as you earn coins for completing different sets, allowing you to go out and buy more packs. Each card also has a point value associated with it, and these points add up to create your overall rank as a collector. My collection score is 304.48, which according to the app puts me in the top 70%. I don't know why this matters, and I mostly use the app to build sets of the digital cards.

Panini Dunk

Panini also did a great job with this app, and Topps Bunt and Panini Dunk are the two I use the most. Coins, however, are harder to get in this app and Panini is more aggressive in trying to get people to spend actual money compared to Topps. The app is still fun, but I can open dozens of packs in Bunt without running out of coins, whereas with Dunk I can only open like three or four before going broke and needing to save more coins for a few more days.

Dunk also features digital versions of actual Panini basketball cards. So, there is Select, Prizm, Hoops, Origins, and lots of others. And they look like the actual physical cards. It's also much harder to build sets in Dunk, so I've found unlike Bunt it is more popular to be a player or team collector in Dunk as opposed to a set builder. All of this makes Dunk feel more like a facsimile of actual card collecting, compared to Bunt which feels more like a mobile game.

On the other hand, there are more in-app games to play in Dunk compared to Bunt. There is no card crafting, but you can play pack battle where you battle against online opponents by opening a pack of cards and seeing who has the better cards. You do this one card at a time and you get to keep your card and your opponent's card for each round you win. There is also a mystery box game, which is basically a slot machine game where you use in-app currency to try to win prizes. There is also a roulette wheel similar to the one in Bunt.

Another game in Dunk is Card Hunter, which is literally just Pokemon Go, but instead of Pokemon it's basketball cards. So, you open up your app and you use it to look around your area in an augmented reality screen on your mobile phone, and you use top loaders to capture cards in the wild. It's fun at first, but not well designed and gets boring quickly. On the other hand, I thought Pokemon Go was lame, so perhaps I am biased.

Where I spend the most time in the app is in the auctions and trade section. Trading works like one would expect. Auctions, however, work the same as selling cards on Ebay. You list cards for a fee and set a minimum bid and a BIN. If the card sells, you pay a final value fee back and collecting the coins. I find it fun to sell cards I got from packs that I don't want and use the currency to buy cards I do want. Since this sounds so much like real life and the cards in the app are just digital versions of actual real life basketball cards, that's what makes this app seem more like real collecting compared to Bunt.

Panini Blitz

I don't have much to say here because this app is virtually identical to Panini Dunk, but with football instead of basketball. It's literally the same. If you're into football and not basketball, this is the app for you. If you like both, you'll enjoy both equally.

Other Apps

Topps has a bunch of other apps for hockey, UFC, soccer, Star Wars, and some other stuff. The Star Wars app is pretty good, and is basically the exact same as Bunt, but with a Star Wars theme.

The other Topps apps, however, are atrocious. The UFC app doesn't even work correctly, as many of the card images fail to load. Reading comments in that app's review sections, it looks like Topps lost the rights to continue to make digital UFC cards, which is odd because Topps still makes physical UFC cards. But the app hasn't been updated in months and probably shouldn't even be available to download, so nothing would surprise me.

Topps also makes Skate for hockey and Kick for soccer. Both are lousy. The hockey one is disappointing because there is a lot of room for growth in the hockey card arena, even if it is digital cards. But there is almost nothing to do in the app but open your daily free pack and collect free coins, and there aren't even that many brands of cards available. It's basically an app where you collect hockey base cards pointlessly.

Kick is the same way, but Topps has agreements with Champion's League and Bundesliga, which means that the app has way, way more Bundesliga players than any other soccer players. The only other players from from Champion's League teams, which means you are constantly pulling Bundesliga players. The app has the same drawbacks as Skate. With Skate, Kick, and UFC, it feels like Topps sunk development money into making Bunt and the Star Wars app, and then just acquired some cheap licenses and used the software coding to produce a bunch of crappy apps for their other sports.

All in all, digital cards absolutely will not be replacing real cards anytime soon. They are basically sports card-themed mobile game, and if you appreciate them as such, then you will have fun. The big advantage I found is that when I get an itch to open new wax, doing so with fake money on one of these apps actually satisfies that itch and prevents me from spending real money. If you find yourself with that itch and want to save some money, then try one of these apps.

Also, out of curiousity, I attempted to sell digital cards from Bunt and Dunk on Ebay. Some people actually make a bit of money selling cards from these apps in real life, and then transferring the card to the buyer within the app. I listed cards I noticed had sold on Ebay before for $1.99 as a BIN with best offer, but I received no offers. I think if you had a ton of rare cards in these apps, you might be able to flip a few for $5 or $10 total, but other than that I don't think these cards have any real world value.

Do you collect digital trading cards?