Excellent Addition To Isekai

Loved the twist on the isekai style I've never seen a book with the card based magic system before and I was sceptical but it works really well. My only complaint is that Graham Mack cannot decide how to pronounce certain words and will say some words 3 different ways in the same couple of sentences and it's incredibly annoying, it's fine if you get the wrong pronunciation just please pick one and stick with it! Otherwise an excellent performance.

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fantastic

such an unusual book as it's card magic rather than normal wizards and stuff but I think it plays it really well

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Not for me

I don't play Magic the Gathering or Yu-Gi-Oh or card games like that so I feel like I might not have been the target market for this. The protagonist is a game nerd who is put into a world where magic is channelled through card games.

The premise is ok although people keep saying how useless goblins are when they seem to be similar to all the other monsters. The fights are fairly dull as the protagonists get unbeatable battle shields and never really seem to struggle.

I thought there would be more clever card loopholes but everything seemed rather straightforward. The protagonist is your normal everyman and he picks up a cadre of followers who all just ally with him because of... narrative intertia?

I never really cared about the characters too much since they never seemed to struggle. There was some good banter and the dialogue was much more realistic than most books but it wasn't enough to fully redeem the story.

The narration was bad. The narrator sounded alternately bored and whiney. All of the main characters sounded tired and fed up. There were little mispronounciations too like "He heard a wall of agony." rather than "wail".

Overall, probably a good book for card game people.

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Looking forward to the next book

I finished this a while back and I'm checking in here every once in a while to see if anything new is out. I think that says a lot for a book 🙂

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Great story but....

Something different, a Deck Building theme. An interesting mix of characters.
The story built up well and left it open for the next in the series.
However whilst I don't normally like it when narrators change part way through a series this one would benefit, sorry but he's not the greatest. A litany of mispronounced words and words with the wrong context (I guess the latter could be the writer but a good narrator would handle these.)
I look forward to the next one and hope for better narration.

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Horrible Narration

but interesting story. the narrator more or less ruins the book.. mispronouncing words constantly.

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Its time to duel! But with goblins!

Rpg level up system, reincarnation/portal story about not being the hero, building a magical deck and gaining weird and interesting allies along the way.

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1 person found this helpful

Great book, really enjoyed it

my first deck builder book, wasn't sure what to expect. was pleasantly surprised by a well put together story and enjoyable adventure with a well implemented combat system. would recommend to all

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“We can admire the deadly killing machine later”

A great LitRPG!
Does it have some flaws? Probably. But honestly, that doesn’t matter! It’s just one of those easy to listen to books that you find you can’t put down with plenty of adventure, battles and cool characters!
The narration is great too and makes the story so easy to listen to. There could be a little more distinction between some character voices and I’m used to hearing stat sheets read differently, but I’d honestly listen to anything that Graham puts out!
Again, thoroughly enjoyed this book and I’m straight into book 2!
This is my honest opinion on a free review copy.

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Intriguing premise, lacklustre delivery.

The premise of having a card game mechanic as a magic system is admittedly a cool idea.

But it doesn't help that the depressing ex-goddess is just annoying and childish, the humour is a dry British kind that didn't hit the mark most of the time for me and the magic feel weirdly and inconsistently limited at times.

One thing that sums up this book for me:
"Your world might be imaginary, but my annoyances is very much real"

The story and world seem very cool and interesting on the flip side though.

Wouldn't recommend, especially not to people (like me) who have played these kind of games before, mechanics felt imbalanced or just weird personally.

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