How to separate "taking inspiration" from "making a clone"

Hello fellow gamedevs. Ever since balatro ive wanted to make my own balatro. But I was too slow on the uptake and now there are way too many balatro clones so I dont want to add to the slop pile.

The game im currently working on started as "balatro but skateboarding" where you would have a 2d sidescroll grid and it would have like random generated course and you would place your tricks along this grid, and then it would run a simulation of your customized skater going through the line you built and racking up points. At first i tried to make it very physics based and super precise on having to build your line correctly. But I realized I was more interested in the deckbuilding angle so I scrapped all that and made the simulation engine almost always succeed regardless of how you arranged your tricks. You lose cuz you didnt build your deck to score enough points, not because you didnt set up your line properly to clear the course.

But then I realized, once you take away the thing that makes skateboarding different, it literally just becomes balatro. Im a bit stuck now cuz I cant bring myself to work on what's essentially a reskinned clone. But translating something like skateboarding to a tactical strategy thing, I couldnt really get it to work because there are too many variables.

The line "balatro but skateboarding" brought me this far but it might also be what holds me back. Any advice?