Describing itself as a “deckbuilding” LitRPG these aren’t your YuGiOh RNG driven heart-of-the-cards style storylines. No monster summoning here. Instead, the cards act as a sort of magical artifact and skill system, where skills are represented physically by cards, and these cards are assembled into decks and gathered via monster drops, crafting, or fusion systems.
Beyond the unique deckbuilding mechanic there is also a game-like system like skill system where the series takes its name from. The protagonist has a card that boosts his skill progression and through his various actions the hero follows the weak-to-strong growth you expect from litrpg & progression fantasy fiction.
What set’s All The Skills apart is its large supporting cast, great character development, and in-depth worldbuilding. It set in a very believable feudal system with dragon riding knights fight monsters and where nobility have the best & highest rarity cards while commoners are lucky to scrape together enough fragments to assemble even a shitty common one.
In a world where owning a single card common card can empower you to be physically stronger, live longer, and be immune to disease that ravages the land there is a tiered society with the “carded” and common folk and even among the carded the rarity of your card affects the dragons you can pair with and those with rare cards rise higher in this highly stratified society.
Beyond the supporting cast and world building the main character is pretty deep, has complex motivations, and is pretty ignorant of the world around him so he is the perfect vehicle to explore the world of the book as he spends the whole book discovering what he can do.
Starts off really slow burn establishing its systems and world for the majority of the first book. If you are looking for action and really seeing the card system shine, keep going until volume two where the story and action really starts to pick up.
Did I mention there are dragons?
There are a lot of dragons and the dragons are really cool.
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