# Deckbuilder Design Principles Shattered Worlds treats deck-building as the primary game, not as a reward wrapper around combat. A good card offer changes a decision: it asks the player to weigh power, deck thickness, timing, synergy, and future risk. Auto-picks, obvious skips, and bloat are design failures even when the card looks exciting. ## Load-Bearing Lessons **Randomness must be owned by the player.** Random card offers and world order create variety, but bad outcomes should be traceable to choices the player made: what they drafted, what they kept, what they discarded, and when they took risks. **Synergy needs mechanical rewards.** Players do not reliably pursue combos just because they are cute. Archetypes need visible set-ups and payoffs, so the player can name the plan and see why one card makes another better. **Thinning and dead weight matter.** Removing cards, accepting junk, or carrying hazardous clutter must be part of the core tension. The world deck system leans on this: hazards clog the hand, rewards alter the player deck, and some worlds intentionally pollute the deck. **UI is design, not polish.** A card game lives in text, targeting, previews, and timing reads. If a player cannot tell what a card will do before committing, the decision is not actually available to them. **Balance answers to play and data.** Single-player design can privilege fun over symmetry, but tuning still needs instrumentation and repeated playtests rather than intuition alone.