Deckbuilder game idea

Imagine Slay the Spire. Branching paths with different advantages and disadvantages, rooms to fight enemies in, with increasing difficulty. A deckbuilder at heart with shops, bosses, etc, but its a first/third person shooter. The main challenge with that is that it is real time, which goes against the natural turn based nature of deckbuilders. This page mainly discusses how to logicly reconcile crossing that boundary.

Ideally this would be a third person or first person shooter similar to Risk of Rain 2, but for practicality I am settling for a 2d top down shooter. I am only one guy with limited artistic and creative abilities and not having to worry about a whole other dimension should help enable me to actually get something deliverable.

There are two general approaches outlined below.

Approach #1 - draw 1 card per shot

• 1 card is drawn for every click/gun is fired
• Each card is a 'bullet'
• Certain enemies can curse you and put blanks/rubber/gun jamming bullets in your deck
• When draw pile is empty, "reload" to reshuffle discard back into draw pile
• Consider showing player next card/bullet that will fire?
• Frees player from potential "brain overload" by not drawing hands, player primarily concerned about deck synergy, movement, aiming, etc
• Fire rate increase effectively equates to draw power
• Gun upgrade ideas:
  • double barrel - draws 2 cards at a time
  • shotgun - draw 5 cards at once, but fire rate is reduced, reload penalty also?
  • burst fire - draw several cards back to back
  • nade launcher? -> all bullets convert to nades, slower rate of fire
• Card ideas:
  • bullets that add burn/freeze/slow/poison stacks, use to build deck synergy
  • life steal bullets
  • shrapnel bullets
  • explosive bullets
  • 'power' cards can be drawn and do basic damage, but give player an ability charge - grappling hook/dash/super jump/under barrel grenade/etc
• Problems:
  • implementing 'powers' may feel a bit awkward
  • how to incentivize card removes/small deck? card removes effectively means more reloads
    • maybe starting cards have downsides?
    • make reloading good?
  • limiting cards to bullets

Approach #2 - draw a 'hand' for each reload

• Each reload is a new hand
• Cards are not limited to being bullets, cards can add modifiers to that magazine
  • Option 1: Cards are still bullets:
    • allows variety to each shot
    • may be more fun if ammo in magazines are not homogenous
  • Option 2: Cards are buffs/modifiers to ammo in current magazine
    • can manipulate magazine itself with mag size buffs/nerfs
    • can manipulate fire rate
• Problems:
  • minimizes the benefits of card removes
  • Feels 'boring', cards in hand could potentially just be ignored
  • active abilities may be awkward