Apple Watch credit card payments declined but card works with Apply Pay

I deleted the card from the phone and re-added it as a new card. For expiration date there was a drop-down menu and no keyboard entry. The drop down menu had options like May-2024, but when selected 05/24 was filled in. Also, my wife's watch (older model, older OS) works perfectly with the same card. I'm suspecting there is something wrong with the RFID on my watch. On the other hand, it works consistently with some merchants but fails consistently with others.

Have appointment with Apple Support via phone callback tomorrow morning. In the meantime, I did another experiment. The Watch reliably fails at Whole Foods, regardless of location. Hard to believe all their readers are broken. Just tried with watch at Whole Foods and it was declined as expired. Immediately tried same card using my iPhone and it worked fine. That suggests there is a problem with the watch NFC. Will know more tomorrow I hope. Will report. Thanks for your suggestions Jeff.

Well, it was an adventure with Apple Support. First person said it was a known problem on their end and that the workaround would be delete the offending card from watch and iPhone and re-add. That didn't work. That person told me the next time it was declined, I should immediately contact Apple Support and they would trouble shoot on the spot. Turned out the people in line behind me at the coffee shop weren't willing to wait for the 15 mins it took me to make a connection to Apple Support. ;-). So I quickly paid with my Apple Card using the watch and took my Apple discussion elsewhere. Was transferred around to someone who was able to remotely run diagnostics on my watch. Amazing. He couldn't find any NFC problems but that there were battery problems that could be the source of the card being declined. BUT, then how could the Apple Card work just fine from the Watch seconds later? "Oh, I'll escalate..." The Senior Advisor was very good and had me to lots of uninstalling and re-install and unpairings. All of this took about 1.5 hours. Unpairing the watch, then repairing, and choosing Manual setup did the trick. Card from Watch worked perfectly at three different merchants this morning who had previously declined it. Who knows that the underlying problem was, but it now works. Only casualty is my customized watch face that I'm having trouble re-creating.