Not seeing lot of special cards in my opponent teams. It looks like the majority really don't care, using good old informs or cheap meta cards.

We might be seeing more icons after secon batch of tokens, and storyline cards starting to get upgrade objectives.

I believe the ultimate goal of EA is to attract as many players to chase objectives, so if big data shows they are not popular, they might sweeten the deal or make it less of a grind.

I've grinded every card so far, but SBC cards should be less expensive or clear you will be using it for 500+ games, otherwise it might be a waste of coins.

To make matters worse is becoming very hard to snipe shadow or hunter chem, so you might get more of a value just buying cheap, fast and tradable CB with shadow, than completing Pique and realizing shadow is out of reach.

Further down the road your skill level will be most important because WL player pick cards will make SBC ones obsolete.