I've been dipping my toes into Skylanders Battlecast,  a new iOS/Android game in which Skylanders characters battle against each other in a trading card game that strongly resembles Hearthstone. Now I'm a bit too old for the original Skylanders or similar toys-to-life genre to appeal to me, but I do understand the attraction for a child: Get a nice toy figurine *and* be able to use it in a video game, even by just bringing your toy over to a friend's house. However I can't understand why Skylanders Battlecast has physical cards for sale.

The Skylanders Battlecast cards can't be played as a game without a mobile platform. They can only be scanned in once, so you can't take them to a friend's house and play with them there. So why would you buy a $9.99 "Battle Pack" in real life and then scan all the cards instead of just buying a $9.99 virtual "Battle Pack" with the same cards? Cards don't make great toys, not a great a figurines. What child is going to build up scenes of battles on the carpet of his room using cards?

The only possible use I can see is for relatives to be able to buy a pack in a toy store and put it in a gift wrapper for a birthday or Christmas. But they can already do that with an iTunes / Google Play gift card, which is probably the better option because it isn't tied to a specific game.

Interestingly Activision seems to rather worried about their own physical cards. They can be scanned only once, so the company is worried that people post their newest cards on Facebook or YouTube and somebody scans the cards from the photographic image before the owner does. That is a potential customer service nightmare. So they even provide a trading shield with which you can show somebody a card while hiding part of the visual information necessary to scan it. They also obviously make less money from the physical cards, because they are more expensive to produce. So why make them at all and not just stick to virtual cards like Hearthstone does?