Have you ever played Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories? Its combat is often regarded as this weird, awkward to play mess, but I honestly found it really fun. For this explanation, I’ll focus on attack cards. Attack cards had 2 different stats to worry about; Keyblade type Attack number Keyblade type affected things like damage, range, reach, etc. If you attacked at the same time as an enemy, the higher number would cancel out the lower one. Here’s the fun bit; you could pile 3 cards on top of eachother to perform special moves. Like, a special move could have the requirement of “3 same Keyblades with attack value between 3-8” or some such. This was called a “sleight”. Since your deck never shuffled, you could build it around sleights, and throw out these moves left & right. The catch? When you reload your deck, you lose the first card used in a sleight. As fun as it was to use in real time, battles only had one of two outcomes. You blast through enemies with no problem, or you die. There wasn’t really any in between. In a turn based enviornment, though, I think this system has a lot of potential. In a turn based game, you could take more time assembling sleights without needing to worry about enemies, and such. Admittedly, and obviously, I’m no game designer, but the biggest hurdle I see is the same one KH: CoM had. How do you keep spamming sleights from being the best strategy? After all, nothing but a 0 card or another sleight can counter anything over 10. I guess there’s the issue of how much info to reveal, too.. in CoM, you saw enemy attacks before they happened, giving you a chance to counter, but would that system still work when time pauses? Maybe rather than pure turn based, it could utilize an ATB gauge, like Child of Light or Dragon Ball Fusions? Hm..