Is Bloons Card Storm Pay to Win? – Answered

Bloons Card Storm is a collectible card game set in the Bloons universe, developed by Ninja Kiwi. Most fans of the Bloons series mostly played the ultra-popular TD or tower defense game from Bloons. However, Bloons Card Storm is their way of exploring and pivoting to other genres. Since Bloons Card Storm is free-to-play, you can expect microtransactions to be present – which invites a lot of questions to the game. The most common question asked is whether Bloons Card Storm is pay-to-win. Let’s find out.

How Pay-To-Win is Bloons Card Storm?

Bloons Card Storm has a library of cards to collect, and you can get all of these cards for free. However, how long will you have to play to get enough cards to run a strong deck? We must go through the systems first before tackling this question.

Premium Currencies in Bloons Card Storm, Explained

There are two currencies available: Cash and Universal Tokens. Cash is used to buy random tokens, specific tokens, or other random cards in the daily shop, including potential heroes and more. Cash is easy to obtain, but it is about average when scaled on the generosity scale.

However, Universal Tokens introduces a pay-to-win system where multiple types of tokens are used for crafting. Here are the types of Tokens in Bloons Card Storm;

• Basic, Advanced, and Large Bloon Tokens
• Basic, Advanced, and Exotic Power Tokens
• Military Monkey Token
• Support Monkey Token
• Primary Monkey Token
• Magic Monkey Token
• Universal Tokens

Note: The Universal Token is a premium token that will act as any type of token for crafting.

These tokens are needed to craft specific cards that fall under the category. For example, a Magic Monkey card type will need Magic Monkey Tokens to craft in your library. If the card is rare, it’ll need thousands of Magic Monkey Tokens to craft.

Judging from the list above, you can see how quickly this becomes a strenuous process since you have 10 types of tokens (excluding Universal Tokens), and you’ll surely miss out on some tokens you really need.

Most daily and weekly missions give you random tokens along with Cash. These random tokens will give you 1 out of 10 chances to get the tokens you need. If you need multiple types of tokens, it’ll still be hard to obtain. Most games have one universal currency for crafting, and introducing 10 is quite challenging for free-to-play players.

Hypothetically, if a player plays every day to complete the missions to earn rewards, that same player must be active and “lucky” to check the daily shop to see if they are offering specific tokens they need for crafting. If you look at the image above, you’ll see some tokens and their stack size for each purchase. Keep in mind that it’ll take 3,000 or more to craft some rare cards and 10,000 – 15,000+ to craft some legendary cards.

This amount of tokens requires a single type of token out of the 10, and you can see how it is extremely bad for free-to-play players. Even if you force your way to grind for months, you might cave in and buy the Universal Tokens to get a single card you want.

Now, if a player chooses to play the adventure mode, the player will still have to pay because the prologue is the only thing free on single-player. Ultimately, the game is too pay-to-win. If I were forced to compliment one aspect of Bloons Card Storm monetization system – at least you can buy Universal Tokens and literally pay to craft a specific card you want.