There isn't much strategy to the game. Essentially, it is a race to see who can pull out the card with the highest numbers. Newcomers will have a hard time keeping up with older players as their decks will be more refined and powerful. Also, it is hard to be truly competitive without spending money.
Power creep is insane. The new season has common characters with stock stats around 5,000 points. A season or two ago, that would have been the ceiling for stats, not the starting point. I regularly see cards between 50k and 100k stat points. I once even faced someone with 200k. How is that fun? There is no way to win against someone like that without paying huge money.
Matching up with other players is a little broken. Basically, the game takes your higheset level card and places you in the tier for that card. So if your best card is an Ultimate (rare) and you have a bunch of hardened (common) cards filling out your deck - you will have a bad time. The game SHOULD calculate your total card score across your entire deck and average it against other players scores. That way it is a little more fair
Speaking of card types - they changed the naming convention. Used to be your typical card names - common, uncommon, rare, ultra rare, etc. Now it is hardened, elite, ultimate, etc. Coming into this from a previous season can be a little confusing. I was lucky to be new in season 5, so the change is less strange for me. But it is hard to look up guides online since most stuff refers to the old naming scheme
Lots of inactive and dead guilds. You join a guild hoping to play some team battlegrounds, but it never happens. Half your team probably hasn't logged on in months and the team leader is equally inactive. Once you join a team, there is a 24 cooldown to leave and find a new one. This can make finding a progressive team very hard. You are basically forced to go a forum or website and find other players who still actually care.
I will say that the game is pretty fair with login rewards and free daily packs. You get a pack every 4 hours and you can watch an ad for one more pack each refresh. You can also watch an add to refill you stamina to keep playing your favorite game mode. As long as you can stand watching a 30 second ad, you can play forever.
The pack store is extremely over priced. Most decent packs will run about 1000 credits, and credits are few and far between - unless you spend your real money.
There doesn't seem to be a way to forfeit a match. The previous event (road to glory) is a 4 match, 4 round event. So you will need about 16 decent cards to advance. It is a bummer to realize within the first round that you are severely underleveled and have to watch yourself get pummeled for 3 more rounds. The only thing you can do is quit the app and relaunch. Not very intuitive.
Amazon's version of this game has no online game service to link an account to - to transfer your gameplay or save your progress. Sure you can save locally, but if your kindle breaks or you decide to upgrade, you can't transfer the data. Any money you spent and your cards are stuck on the original device. I guess you can link a facebook, but lots of people don't have one or would rather not link their personal profile to a game. Android has the google game center and apple has their own game center to link progress. Not really many options for Amazon
I find that the game is waiting for the network a lot. I don't know if it is the games servers having issues, or my router, or the kindles wifi chip. But it can certainly slow down your playing and often lose a little progress, which is annoying
Overall, it is a mixed experience. I do find myself coming back and trying to level my cards, but it is disheartening to see so many HUGE numbers out in the wild. Worth checking out, but I wouldn't recommend spending money



