Something that has been bothering me for a while is how boring the deckbuilding felt in Umblight. It doesn't really have much depth to it and it's quite one-sided.

The problems with the current deckbuilding system:

• The 5 special card limit doesn't feel great and limits strategies.
• Random/shadow cards are hard to understand for new players.
• The best strategies revolve around maxing random card power, then skill chance, then special cards. This system isn't as dynamic as I would like it to be.
• Cost does not matter for special cards at all.
• Random/shadow cards are boring and cannot be upgraded further, going against the "endless scaling" that I'm trying to achieve.
• In the later parts of the game (after ~12 fights) the player receives too many cards that they cannot use, since the cost of their special deck is limited by the highest power card. This was a great way to balance the older versions to avoid one-shots, but it's kind of irrelevant now.
• You can farm an infinite amount of light coins as you can draw an infinite amount of cards.

That's quite a lot of problems, but I have some potential solutions for them.

Change how card cost works

Currently, card cost defines how much shadow coins cost to combine two cards together. From playtesting with other people, I've noticed that this value gets ignored when they first start playing the game. My solution to this is to move the cost from combining cards, to placing cards down. This is how most other card games do it anyway (mana in Hearthstone, blood in Inscryption etc.) This does a few things for the game:

• Special card cost would actually matter, as placing down a cost 7 card would be really hard.
• Fights would be slowed down (good) and players would need to think more on what they place down.
• The room where you can remove the cost of your card would be actually good (this room doesn't exist yet).

I actually tried this out as it's not that hard to implement with the way I structured the board system. I think it's definitely an improvement, but it brings up a few more issues. Both drawing, and placing down cards cost shadow coins, which makes it slightly harder to calculate what you can or cannot do, and an old RNG issue returned, where the first turn can have unavoidable damage.
To solve this, I need to update the deckbuilding system as well. (This part is completely theoretical, I haven't tested any of this yet)

New deckbuilding system

The current deckbuilding system is kind of hard to understand and hard to visualize. Random cards are almost completely RNG based, which isn't fun as it can lead to many undeserved deaths, and special cards are limiting.

My idea for this is to merge the two decks together.

The player would start with 10 or so cards that are 1 damage and have 0-1 cost, similar to how Slay the Spire starts with a bunch of attack and defense cards. Your special cards would be added to the same deck, and you could combine your starting cards at the card totem. This way you can increase the power of your cards infinitely, and every card you obtain could be used. The cost to draw cards would be removed, instead you would draw an X amount of cards at the start of each turn. (needs testing to figure out what number is the most fun) I think if I would implement both of these new systems, Umblight would have a lot more depth on the deckbuilding side, which is honestly much needed currently. Thanks for reading this! If you haven't already, hit the wishlist button! https://store.steampowered.com/app/3151840/Umblight/