User blog:DutchRits/Character Card Comparison, Part 1

In light of the burden I shared with everyone yesterday, I thought it would be wise to move on to a topic which brought me to this community in the first place: character card stat disparity.

Now, I've seen several other attempts to address this issue, like Toot-Toot1's thread, but I wanted to take a different tack. The "deck creep" is pretty well evident from a simple sorting of the MTM stat totals from the All_Character_Card_List, but I'd like to take it a step further: I'd like to offer a blueprint for Mobage to actually FIX the game by rebalancing the cards into distinct tiers, similar to the tiers in the events. I'm going to make my case in multiple parts in order to lay the foundation for my proposal, and to do that I have to begin at the bottom....the common cards.

I've included two photos from the "spreadsheet of justice" I've created using data from the card list mentioned above, which I've done for each card type. Starting with the Common (C) and Uncommon (UC) cards (forthcoming in the next part), however, you can see that Mobage initially had the idea of organizing the cards within a type by "tier," or power level. The end result is that there are stratifications within a card type. The tiers actually work well if you only consider the campaign C, UC and Rare (R) cards as well as the space bridge random draw Super Rare (SR) cards. It is the event cards which throw off this dynamic, which I'll address in a later post.

A closer look at the C cards shows that there is a clear distinction in card power when considering the total of each card's MTM stats. What's more, there also seems to be a nod to the toys/character stats, in which certain characters are weaker than others. (Personally, I would have liked to have seen all of the "mini" Autobots & Decepticon tapes like Gears, Bumblebee, Cliffjumper, Rumble, Frenzy et al, as Common cards (which a few are) rather than full-size characters like Grappel, Hoist, Smokescreen, Red Alert and Sunstreaker, but I get where the developers are coming from.  Some of it is a popularity contest.)  This simple stratification is also easily seen in the second photo I posted, as the respective cards fall into a very obvious pattern.

The bottom line: there are distinct tiers within the Common cards.

Next: the trend continues in the Uncommon cards.