First things first, I’m a big fan of the art in this one! The little icons are expressive and have cool colours on them, and the creature designs are much better than anything I could think up. I also like how the card is enlarged with a star when it’s (intended to be) doubled.
It took me a while to get the concept at first, and now that I’ve played a few rounds, I think it could be a really enjoyable game that I’d come back to if it had a few changes to the balance:
The starting deck choice is extremely cool - I love the choice of fewer high powered cards vs more low powered cards and I can see that having a big impact later on in the game - but all the card decisions after that are not very interactive. For example, when given the choice between Landslide (4), Draft (1), Pebble (1), 4 is the biggest number and there’s no reason for me to choose the other one.
Rather than a power number, the pure choice of which element would help your deck is probably more interesting, and the card’s power could be based on the difficulty of the room you just cleared. Or maybe there could be dual-type cards which are obviously advantageous over single-type cards but could appear with lower power levels on average.
At the moment, it’s unfortunately lacking in skill: some encounters are impossible to win even with perfect draws, and the only run that I won involved me not thinking about which enemy to attack first.
I think it would also be nice if the “show deck” was shown at all times and didn’t show the ones that have been played in this game so it’s easier to strategise over what’s left.
Still, with some of these changes and more variety, I think this would be a really interesting game that people would come back to!