Lore and using lore-tools as mechanics

I've been working on a card game for around ~10 years or so on and off. Tons of paper prototypes and hours of my family dealing with me teaching them new rules (or being mad and tossing my cache lol). I finally started taking it seriously this year and turning it into a digital venture.

Anyway, the point of the post - I am struggling with the world building aspect and lore of the game. If it doesn't tie into mechanics, I don't want to deal with it. I'm a systems guy and a numbers guy (although now I guess I'm an art guy, too...) and I don't even want to deal with lore until that part is all solid as possible. So to get me into lore, I want to build on my existing systems and use a "lore as mechanics" approach. I don't want to increase the surface-area of complexity for my game any further, however (simplicity is key imo).

Lore as mechanics examples:

- "World Events": Card games such as FaB have events like "the crowd cheers" and "the crowd boos" allowing "whenever {cheer|boo}, {effect}" - nothing more than a few words but adds so much flavor and immersion to the game universe. You know you're some kind of gladiator in an arena and this is "sport", etc.

- "Alignment": Drawing from tabletops, Orderly, neutral, chaotic, etc., these flavors can add context to what a character does without really needing to do anything more than assign a "tag" and let the game mechanics fuel the lore. This comes with the additional benefit of added gating - 'an avatar of class X and alignment Y may only use cards with both class X and alignment Y', for example. Clearly this has overhead however, as currently cards are only class-gated in my game and you will need to think about and be 100% aware of these rules when constructing a deck.

- Advanced Card Types: My game technically only has 3 card types - Action, Star, Avatar. There are some variations (Star has sub-types that dictate timing) but that's really it. Games like MTG (creature, ench, inst, sorc, land, artifact,+), Hearthstone (minion, spell, hero, weapon, location), and FaB (it's a lot, like 14+) boast greater (and much greater) type counts. Is this an essential element I'm missing or a key improvement I've made (very purposeful trim thus far, I've strived for simplicity in rules to make onboarding easy)

So I guess what I'm wondering is, as designers have any of you found major benefits in adopting a lore-based-mechanics approach? Should I consider adding these lore-fueling tools, knowing that they will undoubtedly have some overhead in complexity?