I gave this a shot and finished it (minus challenges), but I didn’t love it. The 3 second delay for the deck refresh was a special kind of hell, and I don’t want to deal with that ever again. I think the game would be a lot more fun if that were removed and everything else stayed the same.
But there’s one other change I’d like to see: an upgrade that reinserts bronze cards into the hand, either replacing the highest level card or even inserting it into position 1 and sliding the other cards right. That would make the game fully automated, and I would pay 10 upgrade points for that ability.
By contrast, I never bought direct buy - because the game works like 2048, the quickest strategy I found was to sell everything except one species. When I automated so much that I couldn’t do that, I simplified it by selling everything after e.g. the halfway point in the collection. When you’re doing that, there’s no point to direct buy. A single bronze card is effectively worthless when you need 1000 of them to complete a species.
On a similar note, when I saw that the challenges required no automation, I realized they weren’t for me. I like when games evolve and make you change focus. This game starts by pairing cards in hand, then after you complete a species it changes focus to primarily selling unwanted cards, then after you get enough automation it splits focus with reinserting bronze cards over high-rarity cards - and that’s a mechanical challenge when they’re only on screen for 0.5 seconds (another reason I’d like to see the automatic reinsertion). But requiring no automation seemed to me like a step backward, and it didn’t appeal to me because it felt like it would be a hassle.
One other thing that would be nice for mobile is if clicking a pack bought it, rather than needing to click the buy button underneath it.
On a lighter note, I laughed when I realized the game was about collecting foils.