Why do they need to be so highly obsfuscated?

Yes, I know the answer: So that we can’t figure them out and wouldn’t know how much we actually spend money on anything. For disclosure’s sake, I should tell you that I have spent around $3.50 on the game for the starting bundle. I don’t remember what it included.

But… in general, the resource you can buy from the store is gold. Gold starts from $5.99 for 300 up to $119.99 for 8000. What do they get you? That’s a good question. As far as I understand, the two things you can buy with gold are credits and missions, which will also give you credits, but will also give you season pass progression. Season pass progression, on the other hand, will give you credits, alternate skins for cards and cubes, which can be used, along with credits, to upgrade the art on your cards. Upgrading is important, because it gives you collection level, which is needed to gain new cards, more cubes, credits and alternate versions of cards. Alternate versions of cards are important, because that gives you cheaper ways to gain collection level, because you can upgrade both or all versions. You can also use money to buy premium season pass, which will give you more of everything, but with the limited UI it is hard to say how much of everything, except that you need to have the season pass to gain certain cards.

So, how much does a new cards cost? I have no idea. You do just gain them by playing, so there’s no actual need to use money. Still, it would be interesting to know what you actually get for your money. One obvious thing is that you can’t get anywhere within the game with money only. You still need to play, because that is the way you get the cubes needed for upgrades, at least mostly, so there is not much of a pay-to-win element. However, a mission gives either 50 or 100 credits and I have enough cubes for upgrades that would cost thousands of credits, which I don’t have, but could probably gain if I paid for more missions. I did misuse my credits early on, because I didn’t know how valuable they would be later.

But that leads me to another problem: The aforementioned missions are often quite simple. You just have to play in a certain way. However, sometimes the missions do sort of force you into playing in a less than optimal way. For example, sometimes you have a mission to win a location with four card. That might lead you into a situation, where you might need to loss matches in order to advance in that specific mission. I’ve even retreated when I’m winning a location with one card (another mission), which can be difficult otherwise. Sometimes this is hard, because I simply don’t have the cards to build a specific deck, which could be useful with specific missions.

This does hinder my matchmaking progression, though, so I’m making a trade-off. I guess its a good thing in a way, because it does force players to adopt different decks to finish the missions, which keeps the metagame fresh or at least does its part in doing so.

The overall problem with the complexity of all this is that I’m not into using money, when I can’t really figure out what I’m getting for it. But that’s me. I’m fairly certain this weirdness is intentional, because a certain portion of the audience will be willing to pay just because they feel it is helpful for them, because they can’t really figure out how all this works.

Also, since you still have to play the games, it is also possible that they have deliberately made this complicated, so that you can’t progress in the game without learning the strategies. There are no cards, that will just win you the game. You still have to know how to use cards and how to play around your opponents cards. As the progression will give you new cards and your opponents will also have cards you might never have seen before, pushing people too fast on the track would make their experience worse. So, what you can do with money is to play through missions faster. You only get two missions every eight hours, unless you buy new ones, so that’s the way to use money. You can just play more with it. (You can play without missions, but it just won’t do much for you in regards to advancement.)