First, this should definitely be a podcast. I liked the conversation but you will find a much larger and more willing audience in the podcast format, even with terrible audio quality. Second, Design and Conquest is a good name and Conquest fits because these games are inherently competitive. Third, the appeal of game customization is not binary (I like deckbuilding or I don't), it is a continuum that is colored by the number of decision points a player has to make in the process. For example, I was and continue to be a huge fan of Fantasy Flight's Star Wars LCG. Not Destiny, the LCG. This was the first card game to build with pods. You had to choose 10 groups of 6 cards each to build your deck and if you chose a pod, you had to play all of the cards in it, good and bad (and most pods did have good and bad cards). This was great for me, because as I get older, I simply have less time to devote to deckbuilding and theory craft, however much I may enjoy it. Only having to choose 10 pods made deckbuilding less labor intensive while keeping the process engaging. Was I willing to play 1 bad card in this pod to get two good ones? Maybe I felt two pods were not great but cards 3 and 4 in pod 1 had synergy with cards 2 and 6 in pod 2 in a whole is greater than the sum of its parts kinda way. I like Keyforge partially because the 40ish decision points in Ivion or Magic or the ridiculous 80ish in L5R is reduced to one. Which deck should I play? I love that, because you have to evaluate the deck and individual cards within it as a unit, just the SWLCG pods. Yeah, maybe you'll have some clunkers in there, but you'll have some good synergies as well and it's up to you to find and maximize them. TLDR - Fewer decision points = good. I could also go on about how the size of card pools you have to draw from affects decision points as well but I'll save that for when you guys invite me to speak on your podcast ;). Fourth, I think "competitive players" (as you describe it though I think it is certainly not a monolithic term) will be drawn to Keyforge. Spikes (see Mark Rosewater's psychographics), don't care about deckbuilding. They just want the best thing. Optimizing in game strategy and tactics to assure victory is what Spike cares about. So Keyforge is the perfect game for Spike. The whole game lives in his headspace.