The first one also ruined the series by going back to rebels vs empire for no reason.

That’s on you, civ hasn’t released a good game on launch in a very long time. You need at least the first expansion to have a complete game.

There two big differences to me are scale and value. A ccg has rare cards, but they aren’t actually that rare compared to loot boxes. Loot boxes tend to have both lower drop rates and pollute their drops with lots of garbage, even for rare drops. Secondly, physical cards have value, you can sell or trade them, you can buy singles of cards you want. You can use them for things other than the game as well.

Covid inflation didn’t happen before the increase in money supply.

MMT is popular among politicians because it makes money seem free, but reality gets in the way when countries increase their printing and inflation goes up.

Given we have multiple examples of printing money leading to inflation and eventually hyperinflation, and we have 0 examples of printing money not leading to that, it’s reasonable to conclude there is a causative link.

As others have said start with 5. The rule of thumb for civ games is to wait for the expansion dlc to release and buy the game on sale. 7 is also a significant departure from the previous games, so it’s probably even more important to wait or outright skip it until they get it more polished.

Also it’s worth looking into endless legend or endless space 2 if you want to try more 4x games.