YMMV / Animation Throwdown: the Quest for Cards

• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: There are generally two types of player variety:
  • Expect to see a lot of Pay To Win-based players using premium heroes Zapp Brannigan and Consuela. Zapp is a versatile Jack of All Stats who can buff his entire deck's attack, heal low-health cards and deal additional damage with his punch ability, while Consuela is a powerful tank who's good at stalling by healing her entire deck at once while lowering the entire enemy team's attack.
  • On the flip side, Free-to-Play-based players will usually use Tina, Roger, Dale and Bobby because none of them have abilities that require specific show cards to activate, making them versatile for a variety of decks.
• Game-Breaker: The Cigarette Addicts combo is extremely overpowered. Its abilities consist of extremely high Berserk, Leech and Gas, ensuring it can deal heavy damage in short order while healing itself up. It is easily accessible through multiple character cards (Hank, Bobby and Peggy) and uses a wide variety of Addicted/Hyper cards. The combo is so good that, even after years of Power Creep, it remains the best option for Addicted/Hyper decks and sees use in various other game modes for its sheer ease of use.
• High-Tier Scrappy: Zapp Brannigan is infamously considered the best character in the game. While he doesn't have many combos, the few he does have possess extremely high stats and powerful abilities. Unsharp Scissors Zapp is a brutally powerful attacker who can decimate walls with his high Berserk and Punch, War Horse is a tank with impressive support abilities and high Bunker, and Zapp Figurines is an impenetrable wall that can boost allies into dealing ridiculous damage per turn.
• Hollywood Pudgy: Leela has a pre-battle line to Bobby claiming herself to be a "former chubby kid." However, her child self — who is seen in the game as the "One Eyed Orphan" combo card — was never drawn particularly chubby◊ (contrast with Amy, who is explicitly Formerly Fat).
• Low-Tier Letdown: While most of the cast range from good to bad depending on the current theme, Avery Bullock is widely considered the worst character in the game. Not only has he fallen to Power Creep due to a lack of new combos, most of his existing combos suffer from being very mediocre ability-wise (Hoverthrone King, Rocket Launcher Bullock), horribly overspecialized (Rocker Bullock, Furry Bullock), or having poor card distribution (Finger Cutter only works with one Legendary weapon card: Long Stick with Sharp Rock). While he still has some genuinely good combos such as Angry Bullock, Ripped Bullock and Beer Helmet, these combos aren't enough to redeem Bullock in the long run and it's widely agreed that he desperately needs new combos to use.
• Squick: Some of the character quotes used during battle have a sexual undertone to them, such as Leela threatening to kick the opponent's "well-toned ass"^note in the original context, she was referring to Lucy Liu or Steve and Tina's general Hormone-Addled Teenager personalities. This looks a little weirder if the opponent is an animal character like Brian or a child character like Louise or Stewie... even if such humor wouldn't be off-brand for some of these shows.
• Underused Game Mechanic: Several of the card themes are notoriously underused and haven't received as much attention as other established themes, with the few cards existing for them having fallen to severe Power Creep:
  • The Hyper trait has no Legendary or Mythic cards, rendering most of its combos too weak to see serious use, and most characters don't have Hyper combos to begin with. This is subverted after all Addicted cards and combos are merged with the Hyper cards and combos in Oct/Nov 2023.
  • The combos created by fusing characters with the Golf Cart Escape or Planet Express Ship cards don't even have traits to begin with, despite being completely unique and inaccessible through any other means.
• Unexpected Character: The September 2022 update brought a completely new series to the game: Archer, with Archer himself as a playable hero and Archer, Lana and Krieger as character cards. Given that the game only had five series for years since its launch, very few players saw a sixth series joining the roster, especially one that didn't originate on Fox (Archer premiered on sister channel FX).