A Video Game trope where the game's setting (e.g. combat system) doesn't involve actual cards, but the mechanics the game uses to implement its system use cards anyway.
In other words, these cards exist outside the universe's Fourth Wall, and are invisible to the in-universe characters; who are still clashing swords and summoning spells, not slapping cards down on some table.
Expect to see one character with full Medium Awareness of the subject, solely to teach the player how the battle system works. After that, the card system is (almost) never explicitly mentioned again.
Now this doesn't always work just like a Collectible Card Game; as sometimes you have access to the entire deck at once and merely have to pick the best card for a given situation. Running out can cost you precious time (i.e. reloading your deck leaves you open to attack) or even cause a Game Over.
A Sister Trope to Card Battle Game. Not to be confused with Death Dealer, when a fighter uses the cards themselves as a weapon.
Examples:
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Tabletop Games
- Castle Falkenstein uses playing cards as the main mechanic. This is explained as the game having been created In-Universe, by a game designer who ended up in the Falkenstein universe, and the prejudices of that world mean that gaming with dice just isn't "proper".
- Deadlands uses ordinary playing cards for a lot of mechanics including initiative, spellcasting and weird science gadgetry.
- Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition had the Tome of Battle supplement come with online "maneuver cards", which could be printed out for quick reference of the effects of different martial techniques. Given that the Crusader class from said supplement had a limited pool of maneuvers which expanded randomly on each turn, it was extremely common for Crusader players to keep a deck of maneuver cards which they could draw from and shuffle.
- Combat in Fury of Dracula is handled with a fairly basic card battle mechanic. Hunters have a few stock combat cards like Punch, Dodge and Escape, and can supplement these by finding & exchanging weapons, talismans and special abilities in the course of the game. Dracula has a more varied range of starting cards, including most of the classic vampire powers. All combat cards have various combinations of icons that interact based on a Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors mechanic, so the Hunters' main advantage is in Drac not knowing what other tricks they have up their sleeves, while they (usually) know exactly what he's capable of.
- Tabletop Game/Gloomhaven: Characters pick two cards, the upper ability from one and the lower ability from the other. Characters start with a hand of 15 cards, which are discarded or burned as they're played, and those cards need to last through a few rooms of enemies. Actions take place on a grid, thus they're also susceptible to positioning.
- Lace & Steel features card-based dueling systems for swordfighting, sorcery, and repartee.
- Fabula Ultima: The Ace of Cards class uses a stripped deck of playing cards to represent its abilities. The player draws cards from the physical deck, the character spends MP to play sets of those cards from their hand, and the set, suits, and/or values of the played cards determines what happens. This is meant to represent an in-universe deck of Cards of Power, which the Ace of Cards uses to work their magic.
- Magic: The Gathering:
- In Battlemage. Between battles you select cards to your deck, including individuals who have agreed to join your side. Combats are fought in RTS style. Lands create a mana pool, that acts like traditional resource pool and units either attack towards the enemy or stand in front of you and defend. Your choice of actions is limited by your "hand", a selection of seven cards from your deck.
- Inverted in Shandalar (part of the original MTG PC game). Instead of an RPG that used cards for the combat mechanics, it was a port of the card game with an RPG as the Framing Device.
- This even applies in the proper card game, as the cards just represent wizards dueling with spells, summoning and attacking with monsters, and drawing power from the land.
- The short-lived TSR SAGA system used special cards in place of dice, with unique decks for Dragonlance: The Fifth Age and Marvel Super Heroes Adventure Game.
Action RPG
- Lost Kingdoms: You can choose up to four cards in each given battle. Each cards contains the power of a supernatural creature, and activating the card summons the creature to deliver an attack, or heal/Status Buff you.
- LunarLux: Upon choosing an active skill to perform, the player must choose from a list of three support skills to activate, which randomly picks skills from a pool that the player designated. Not only are repeats allowed in the same list of three, the player must designated at least 10 skills for this pool, ensuring that they can't just skew the odds in their favor by having only a few skills in the pool. However, certain upgrade chips allow the player to equip fewer skills and allow more red skills to be equipped. This is supposed to be reminiscent of folder building in Mega Man Battle Network.
- Averted in one the strangest ways possible in The Twisted Tales of Spike McFang. The main character fights using a variety of cards and said use of cards affects the progression of plot and puzzles. However, the actual gameplay is a top-down action game, the game has little to do with the traditional aspects of a collectible card game, functioning more like a glorified inventory.
Card Battle Game
- Zig Zagged by Hearthstone. The game's meta-narrative is that it takes place in The Little Shop That Wasn't There Yesterday where heroes and villains from across time and space come together to play Hearthstone (which is a card game that exists in World of Warcraft, albeit as a physical game rather than a digital one). However, Hearthstone's actual story missions ignore the card game aspect and instead are meant to represent physical battles taking place between heroes.
- Shadowverse is a straightforward Collectible Card Game, but the story mode shows no indication of cards being used in any way.
- Soukoku No Arterial, where the entire cast has supernatural power, devil- or angel-based, but all combat is done with cards. The result, if anything, is closer to a Strategy RPG, only with cards.
- Marvel Trading Card Game, based on VS System TCG, involves normal comic book hero vs. villain storyline, but every time there is a fight, you play cards.
Card Games
- Poker Quest: Sword and Spades involve a 52-card deck dealt to the player and opponent. Sets of cards are used to power attack abilities, based on the item or ability being used (e.g. any cards adding to at least 20, three of a kind, etc.)
- Solitarica is a based on of pyramid solitaire, where cards are removed from the tableau if they are one higher or lower than the card in the discard. When a new card is needed, the enemy also plays its own action from it's deck.
Dungeon Crawler
- In Dicey Dungeons, The playable Jester's gimmick is that they use a deck of cards they swap out every turn instead of a regular inventory.
- In Guild of Dungeoneering, characters start out with a deck of cards based in their classes, and gain more based off what loot they collect.
- Slay the Spire revitalized the card-RPG genre with a generalized ruleset:
- You have a deck, while your enemies have a pre-generated but powerful moveset.
- Each turn, you draw cards from your draw pile and gain a specific number of action points (typically 3, which can then be modified based on the cards you play and any passive bonuses on your character). At the end of the turn, the cards you played and in your hand go to the discard pile, which is turned into the new draw pile once the old draw pile runs out of cards. Each card has an action point cost, with stronger cards requiring more action points or special conditions to play them, including exhaust which prevents the card from returning to the deck after reshuffling.
- Card types typically consist of Attack, Block (decreases non armor-piercing damage and is removed after the enemy's turn), Tactics (buffs/debuffs), and Items (can only be used a limited number of times, then they're removed from the deck permanently).
- All of the above are treated like skills you actually have instead of cards in a deck you hold.
Fighting Game
- Bleach: Blade of Fate uses cards to represent special attacks and various Status Buffs.
- Sonic Battle uses a card system to customize Emerl's moveset while playing like a typical fighter.
- Touhou Hisouten ~ Scarlet Weather Rhapsody requires each character to equip a 20-cards deck (each character has her own personal pool to choose from); you "draw" a card by filling a super meter. There are three kinds of cards: "System", relatively simple effects that can be used by all characters; "Skill", which can improve your current special attacks or swap them with other specials of the same category; and "Spell", super moves that almost always consume multiple cards at once.
- The entire Wrestle Angels series has you controlling female wrestlers with cards.
MMORPG
- Delivery Missions in Billy vs. SNAKEMAN. There are hints that the in-universe card games Mahongg (and even more so Flower Wars) are covers for something affecting reality on a deeper level. Although in this game it seems like everything is secretly affecting reality on a deeper level...
- In Second Life, there is a popular card game called En Garde, which emulates a swordfight (complete with animations): only the players see the cards, spectators see a (slow-motion) duel.
- Wizard101 has spells as cards, but there is no real 'collectible' element to making a spell deck. You unlock spells for your school as you advance in level, and the only limit to the number of copies of a particular spell is determined by your deck-box, a piece of equipment that you trade for better versions as usual. You do however get a limited number of 'training points' you can use to get spells from outside your school, but since you need to acquire them linearly you're usually just better off focusing on one extra school.
Platforming Game
- The bosses in Yo! Noid are fought this way. The cards depicted either attacks or pizzas, depending on the regional version.
Puzzle Game
- The Patience Pack
has a game called Armor of God, in which the player tries to build his castle before the enemy can finish tunneling under the foundation. Your cards represent parts of the armor of God mentioned in Ephesians 6, and your opponent's cards represent Deception, Accusation, Hatred, Temptation and Death.
- Not involving cards, but Puzzle Quest has the same idea; you and your enemies do damage and collect mana by matching stones on a puzzle board, even though you're just fighting monsters according to the storyline.
Role-Playing Game
- Inverted in the SNES game Arcana. Cards figure heavily into the backstory and plot of the game, but when it comes to gameplay has almost nothing to do with cards other than a visual motif.
- Baten Kaitos plays with this trope, but ultimately uses it straight. Magnus are actual in-universe cards, which are used for storing various items, from groceries, to weapons, to body parts of an evil god. They are apparently so ubiquitous, people barely mention them in conversations, much like in reality you'd say that you bought some food, rather than a box of food. Battle systems of both games, however, have almost nothing to do with the lore concept.
- In Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean you draw Magnus cards from your shuffled deck. Each of these contains a weapon, an item, a piece of armor, or a special attack and selecting it makes your character use it once to attack, defend or heal. While having many different tools to fight with during battle is immensely useful, there's no reason why your characters would not just keep their best weapons and armor for the whole fight and even less justification for why your deck is shuffled, why you have to use cards for special attacks and how your items like potions and food always stay full after use.
- Baten Kaitos Origins introduces Attack Magnus which can be used by everyone in your party, even though Magnus cards are not supposed to hold actions at all. It also introduces an equipment system, that involves using a Magnus to buff its user's stats. The thing is, these "equipped" Magnus "break" after a few hits, and miraculously return into your deck, ready to be used again. Healing items, meanwhile, once again can't be spent, and remain always full.
- In Fate/Grand Order, each Servant has five attack cards that fall into one of three different categories: Buster (red, inflicts extra damage), Quick (green, inflicts multiple hits and raises the rate at which you reap Critical Stars that are applied to the next turn), and Arts (blue, raises their Noble Phantasm gauge). In battle, all of your frontline Servants' (up to three) cards are placed into a deck of up to 15, five are dealt at a time, and you pick three cards that determine which Servants attack and what type of attacks they use. Picking three cards that belong to the same Servant grants them an Extra Attack, and picking three cards of the same type gives a bonus: three Buster cards grants additional damage, three Quick cards adds 10 Critical Stars, and three Arts cards gives instant NP gauge boosts to everyone whose cards were picked. Once the deck is emptied (1-3 turns, depending on how many Servants are in battle), the deck is refilled and reshuffled.
- Kingdom Hearts:
- Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories zigzags this trope. Cards are present in the game's setting, as Sora is told that cards are used to progress in Castle Oblivion and he obtains World Cards used to generate new floors, but in most cutscenes no one is ever seen using cards to fight.
- The Command Deck system in Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep, Kingdom Hearts coded, and Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance]. Players build a Deck by collecting Commands through various means and equipping them; characters have a limited Deck capacity that increases over the course of the game, with stronger Commands taking up more space. By pushing a button, characters can instantly use a special attack or item, but upon doing so the Command must "reload" and can't be used for a period of time. There's no explanation as to why the characters can't just use all of their best moves whenever they want as much as they want.
- Mobius Final Fantasy uses equippable "cards" for your magic and attacks, but these do not act mechanically like cards. What does act like cards is the orb-drawing mechanic, which lets you "draw" an orb for every attack you make and put it into your hand, which can then be used to pay for one of your "card" abilities.
- Paper Mario:
- Paper Mario: Sticker Star's stickers function like action cards: Any action Mario takes in a battle must be done using a sticker, including staples like jumping. Mario can also turn objects (or even living things) into stickers, which can then be summoned mid-battle when played.
- Sticker Star's battling system extends to the next Paper Mario game, Paper Mario: Color Splash, only this time, Mario is directly using a deck of cards to battle with.
- In Sigma Harmonics, cards represent Neon's abilities, with each card even having its own recharge meter. Their recharge is based on the music, with Rhythm Game-like mechanics. Confusing? Well, in the story it's Sigma who plays the music, directing Neon's actions (who has no conscious control over her body during battles due to being possessed by her own summons).
Sports Game
- Both Dodge Danpei games use "Battle Cards" to represent soccer maneuvers.
- Pocket Card Jockey has the player as a rookie horse racer who gets trampled to death in their first race. An angel takes pity on them and, upon learning that they're terribly naïve and have zero skill in even riding a horse, brings them back to life and gives them the ability to perceive horse racing as a literal game of golf solitaire. Of course, everyone else still sees horse racing as actual horse racing, and are either deeply confused when the player explains that they win by playing cards or see it as an odd metaphor.
Third-Person Shooter
- Paladins has three types of cards utilised in its gameplay. A "loadout" deck which provides extra power and cooldown reductions to a champion and their abilities (20 cards for each champion, 5 each for their main three abilities, and the last 5 for their main weapon and passive armor effects) which are unique for each hero, and 16 cards that are bought in-battle (think like the equipment in a MOBA) with four types: Defense, Utility, Healing, and Offence. There are also "Talent" cards, with one only available when a character comes out, but more unlock as you level them up. Talent cards compliment your loadout and massively change the gameplay style of the character.
Turn-Based Strategy
- Battles of Prince of Persia has cards which determine the amount of orders that the player can give to their units during this "hour" (a sequence of turns).
- Culdcept series uses cards to represent spells, summoned creatures, their attacks, and so on. Even battle animations are highly abstract - like having a dinosaur summon a sword, which slashes the enemy card.
- Endless Space uses cards to represent battle tactics.
- The Etherlords series uses cards to summon creatures and use spells. Your hero, meanwhile, doesn't attack physically, fighting only through spells. It's made a little weird when one of the playable characters in Etherlords II has glowing red eyes and holds a very large sword, yet battles are handled entirely through cards.
- Metal Gear Ac!d and its sequel. All equipment and attacks are tied to cards. So yes, apparently Snake needs that card to deliver a spin kick.
- Mawlock from the Shining Force remake, Resurrection of the Dark Dragon, whose specialty lies in using character cards to change the tide of battle. Cards are obtained through various arbitrary methods, such as talking to a certain character a number of times at your home base, or using a certain character to deliver a killing blow on a boss.
- Yggdra Union: Before your turn you have to choose a "Tactic Card". It determines the combined distance that your characters can travel this round, as well as their attack power and special abilities. If you run out of cards, it's game over. Curiously, the game attempts to explain it by tying the concept to the Power of Words, the Reality Warping magic of the setting. It still doesn't explain why do your units have to share move points.
Visual Novel
- Princess Waltz is a Visual Novel that resolves its battles through a very abstract card game. They don't even have any images, just numbers.
Wide Open Sandbox
- Dead Rising 2 (and the related Case Zero prequel game) allows you to combine ordinary items to form super weapons (bat plus box of nails equals spiky bat; shotgun plus pitchfork equals boomstick). But your ability to use these to their fullest is goverened by whether you've collected the associated "combo card." If not, you gain less experience from using the weapon, and you are unable to use the weapon's "strong attack" variant. Combo cards are non-diegetic rewards — you earn them when you level up, defeat bosses, and do other plot-related things.
