Thanks, I appreciate the answer, yes I think I see what you are getting at. I guess what I am missing is a sense of the sort of stuff I’d see when I look through that “window”. I will probably have to try it myself to fully get it.

I am curious about Journey on the top. I haven’t played the game, partly because I got the impression that it’s a relatively short game with little replay value. Now I went to look again and I did find a few Steam reviews with hundreds of hours of playtime but they don’t really elaborate on why they keep playing it. Here is what one review says:

“Albeit not a long game (typically 2h long), it has a great replay value, mostly because of its anonymous multiplayer.”

I’d love to hear your take on why you’d want to keep replaying it. I am OK with spoilers if necessary.

For lane battlers where you mix sub-decks my favorite is Riftforce, especially once you add the expansion to increase the number of available factions. The factions are drafted and each player ends up with 4 factions. Cards from a given faction share the same power but have different strengths. This gives a good variety of abilities but since there are only 8 in a given game they are still easy to keep track of and plan for.

Tyrants of the Underdark, is a bit different but I like it a lot: a river-market style deckbuilder where the market deck is a mix of two themed decks. The current edition comes with 6 factions.

If you are open to coop/solo then Marvel Champions is somewhere halfway into this direction. Each hero comes with a small preset deck and you then customize this by picking cards from exactly one of the four aspects (factions) available in the game.