Duel links is finally enough of a standalone game to recommend playing it instead of the actual trading card game. It has its own meta game which is constantly shifting, a dedicated player-base and a competitive season/ system which works half decently. However, this all comes with one huge caveat, the monetisation.

The basic way to earn cards is through buying packs, each contain 3 cards and set you back 50 gems. On the surface, this system seems perfectly acceptable, however due to the speed at which they're releasing new sets, and each set drastically altering the meta-game, you as the player are put in a scenario where you cannot keep up with the meta unless you either save up gems and splash out on the next powerful set, or buy packs. Again, this doesn't seem too bad either, but then you consider that a considerable amount of the meta decks, require ultra and super rare cards from previous very old sets, and since there is no way to acquire them outside of spending gems, you can lose thousands of gems all in order to try and get a single ultra rare from an otherwise obsolete set. Two ways to fix this problem are to either implement a trading system, this would fix the issue of not being to acquire some specific older cards by allowing players who perhaps have multiple copies, to trade them with newer players who do not want to spend 2000 gems in order to acquire a single card. The second way to fix this issue, is to implement a "dust" system like in hearthstone, this way even if one does spend 2000+ gems on a single card, they are able to convert their useless normal and rare cards into "dust" which they can use in order to acquire a dream super rare/ ultra rare ticket, which they could in turn use to acquire any SR or UR card from the older sets perhaps.

As it stands however, the game itself is phenomenal, a lot of the decks in the current meta have great player interactivity and the constantly evolving landscape keeps me wondering which decks will emerge as top tier from each and every new release. If it wasn't for the poorly implemented monetisation, this game would be an easy recommendation, but as it stands, its a recommendation with a warning label.