I love my MBNA card. They are very curteous and are a very well established institution. If they accept your application, you can't go wrong with them, in my experience.
You can build a postive credit rating very quickly by making all of your everyday purchases on the card. I never carry balances from one month to the next.
With MBNA, I have been a customer long enough that if I ever needed to, I can do up to 2 payment vacations per year. I just let them know that I won't be making a payment this particularl month and it rolls over to the next. Like I said, I haven't ever had to use it, but sure is nice.
As for the graphical stuff, I have a pretty cool tiger on my Discover card that copped me a free mini-fridge in Vegas because the hotel desk guy had a thing for tigers. He started to explain, but then ended it with, "but you understand, so I don't need to tell you!" I just shook my head yes and scooped up the mini-fridge up to our room!
So who knows? Get both. You might also find that one place won't take Discover but will take Mastercard (MBNA) or vice versa. 2 is a very practical amount of credit cards. Anything can happen on a trip, even demagnetized strips or when your card views some activity and wants to verify whether it's suspicious.
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