Building a digital TCG that tries to actually fix mana screw/flood and dead collections, set in a sci-fi universe we’ve been developing for a while

We’re an indie team building a digital TCG.

Wanted to share where we’re at and get some honest reactions, especially from people who’ve felt burned by the genre’s usual problems.

The two big things we’re trying to fix:

Mana screw and flood. Still the #1 way a good matchup turns into a disaster, your decisions get reduced to almost nothing and there’s basically no path back. Our fix: two decks. Every turn you choose whether to draw a card or draw a resource. Not a free pass, it’s a real decision every turn, but you’re never just sitting there with nothing to do.

Dead collections. In most digital TCGs your cards never had real value to begin with, they’re a license tied to your account. We’re building around an actual player-to-player marketplace. Duplicates are yours to trade or break down for crafting material. If you ever walk away, you walk away with something.

(We know some games “solved” these problems before by just removing depth, simplified resources, shallow trees, solved matchups. That’s the trade-off we’re trying to avoid.)

A couple of other things going on:
• Combat has two targets: the opponent’s life total, or the resource nodes (Naked Signal Nodes, in the lore, more below) running their whole game plan.
• Before a match, both players draft which Hub abilities are active, one pick at a time, reacting to each other. Same two decks, different opening every time.
• Five factions, each with a genuinely different philosophy, mechanical identity, and art/sound direction.

The setting, briefly: it’s the year 17732. Humanity’s spread across the galaxy via “the Signal,” a dimension where information and existence overlap. For 10,000 years, every connection to it had to be built at huge cost. Now natural rifts (“Naked Signal Nodes”) are appearing on their own, more and more often, for reasons nobody agrees on, and every faction is racing to claim them. That’s the war the game is set in, and it’s also literally what the “attack the nodes” mechanic represents.

Where we’re at: core systems and one faction’s card pool are in active development. Not vaporware, but also not close to done, this is a “does the core idea sound fun” check as much as anything.

Genuinely interested in: does the dual-deck thing sound like it’d work, or do you see a failure mode? Does “attack the nodes instead of face” sound like a real decision or a gimmick? And if any of this is your kind of project (art, dev, sound, writing, testing) we’re looking for people too, happy to talk more in DMs.