Basic Trope: In a card game, the strength and importance of characters in the original work or the game's lore has little correlation with their strength and importance in the game.
- Straight: Avenging Alice, an Action Girl and the main character, gets a card that is generally unremarkable and only effective in casual play, while Bob Beater, a side character who didn't show up until three seasons in and lost all his fights, gets an excellent card that becomes a tournament staple.
- Exaggerated: Galakticon the Destroyer, a world-consuming entity that can warp reality itself, gets a card that is at the lowest rarity and has stats worse than the Com Mons and no abilities. Meanwhile, the Crimson Trooper, a generic soldier who appeared in one scene, had no dialogue, and was killed off right after appearing, gets a card at the highest rarity that is banned from all tournaments for being too absurdly good.
- Downplayed: Avenging Alice's card is still considered pretty good, but Bob Beater's card has more uses strategically.
- Justified:
- Alice's card showed up in the first set, while Bob's showed up in the sixth expansion (since he's less important); at that point, Power Creep had kicked in, meaning that pretty much all cards in the set were better than Alice's.
- Alice's card was meant to be generically playable in all decks, while Bob's was more specialized and gimmicky; this meant that he had uses that Alice didn't.
- Alice's card was put in every starter deck to make her more widely available to players, and Power Equals Rarity kicked in.
- Bob's greater level of power was actually the result of Loophole Abuse on the part of clever players, rather than him being intentionally designed as strong.
- Alice is a Badass Normal, while Bob is a super that is too easy to predict (and redirect). It's difficult to account for skill.
- Inverted: Alice's card is ludicrously better than Bob's, to the point that she gets banned from tournaments, while Bob is actually even less effective than he was in the show, being a full-on Joke Character.
- Subverted: An expansion comes out that releases new support cards and a new version of Alice's card, making her a top-level strategy, and also hard-countering Bob's card to the point of him falling out of relevance.
- Double Subverted: However, after a few months, players realize that strategies focused on Alice still have to work with the original mediocre card, making them inconsistent, and Bob players figure out countermeasures that lead to him becoming dominant again.
- Parodied:
- Tiny Fluffy Bunny has the effect "you win the game when this card is played." Omnius the Death-Destroyer has the effect "your opponent wins when this card is played."
- Later cards show things like Bob lording over the fact that his card is better than Alice, Alice struggling to make a good deck with her own card, and eventually revealing that Bob's card was actually her disguised as him and vice versa.
- Zig Zagged:
- Alice's card is actually pretty good, but her Worthy Opponent Carol is near-useless. Meanwhile, Bob is considered pretty bad, but Dave, who's considered even worse than Bob in-universe, is better than all of the above combined.
- Alice and Bob have had multiple cards of them made, ranging from Joke Character to Game-Breaker with little consistency.
- Averted: Alice's card is about as good as you'd expect.
- Lampshaded: "Wow, Alice, your card is absolute garbage. Why'd they do that with you?"
