Deck Builder

Deck building stories are the other “main” sub-subgenre of GameLit. As I mentioned in the LitRPG post, this isn’t a setting. It’s just the magic system. Where that system exists or how it appeared isn’t important.

These stories use cards as their magic catalyst. People somehow acquire magical cards that let them summon weapons or pets, or use spells. Most of the time there’s a hard limit to how many cards someone can use at a time. This gives us the “building” aspect: a character can have twenty cards available, but only use five in any given battle. Strategy is very important in these stories.

As far as I've seen, there’s usually three types of cards: summon cards, spell cards, and buff cards. Summon cards then have three varieties: summon creature, summon item, summon potion.

Summon creature cards make something with its own autonomy appear. Think Digimon. The creature that appears is under the command of the summoner, but it has the ability to think and act on its own. If it’s stronger than the summoner, it might overpower them and (worst case) turn the summoner into their minion.

Summon item cards usually make a weapon appear. Although for casting-based characters it might make a magic-boosting wand or staff appear. In these cases the cards act like an “inventory”; just storing things in another dimension until needed.

Generally, summoning an item also summons knowledge on how to use it. Not to an expert level, but someone who has never used a sword before will at least get the knowledge on how to hold their summoned sword correctly.

Summon potion cards generally only work once. They’re often called “consumable” cards, and vanish after one use. The potion can heal, or give mana, or remove poison effects, anything. Sometimes the card makes a physical bottle appear, which the character has to drink, but nine times out of ten it works automatically.

Which brings us to spell cards.

Spell cards are very dependent on the author’s needs for their world. How strong they are and how often the character can use them depends on what the plot needs more than anything.

This is the area where the most “useless” cards appear. A character might need a defensive magic spell, and will get five of the same attack spell cards. Or the author might have an element system in place, and a water-affinity character might get a handful of fire spells.

Lastly we have buff cards. These are the most simple and the least used by authors. All they do is add a +1 (or any other arbitrary number) to any stat.

If the author has them, they’re generally only used while the character is low-level. When the character has no other cards to use.

It makes them less squishy. But after a few fights, when they naturally lose their squishy-ness and have found cards with longer descriptions, these cards get left behind.

Almost always, there's some kind of ranking to cards. From common to epic, from bronze to diamond, from green to purple, you get the gist. There’s some way to immediately show “this card is better than the others”.

This is usually shown by the border of the card. Sometimes they glow, or the color of the text shows what rank they are, or the text itself, but nine out of ten times it’s a border.

These stories are seen as the smarter, more strategic subgenre of GameLit. It isn’t just getting numbers to level up, and leveling up to get more numbers. There’s a sense of characters trying to figure out how to use what they’ve been given within strict limitations. In other types of GameLit, characters can use anything they have. In deck builders, not being able to use everything is kind of the point.

So tldr: deck builders focus on getting magic cards and using them strategically.