All The Skills

As of the time of writing this review, I have read the available chapters (chapter 30 in book two or so).

Blurb

The most Arthur could hope for was to someday earn a trash-tier spell card. When fate grants him a Master of Skills card, he’s thrust into a world of opportunity and danger.

To survive and grow strong, Arthur must learn skills. All the skills.

Thoughts

Damn, that blurb is light, isn’t it?

It does cover the more important things though. Our MC gets a Legendary tier card at a young age, and then we get to see him exploit his good fortune. Now, we should not that this isn’t a busted card. In that there are some other similar concepts out there, like The Legend of Randidly Ghosthound that also make use of the MC having a surplus of skills. In Randidly’s case, he is stupidly OP. Arthur, less so. One reason why is that his card is one of a number of “Master of” cards, and—no spoilers—you’ll start to see the others crop up in book two.

The book starts us off in the frontier-style village Arthur lives in, but soon moves onto new places. There’s a global affliction around (which gives me similar vibes to the Scourge or the Blight) that provides a larger narrative problem, but the first few books our MC is learning and growing up, not changing the planet.

The book focuses on Arthur (no back and forth PoV swaps), and the cast of supporting characters is fairly low, which means you get to spend some time getting to know everyone. There’s a bit of politics lurking in the background that will probably become plot points relatively soon, which is nice. There are quite a few things boiling away in the background, and you can feel the dominoes lining up for the MC.

Alas I’ve run out of chapters to read before I can see them all tumble down, so I’ll check back in six months time and keep reading.

If you like card based systems, obviously check it out. With that said, it does feel like the system is being underutilised. Cards are traded, but that’s about it from what I’ve seen. You can take shards (pieces of a card) or whole cards from monsters, and make a new card, but that’s about it. I was hoping for something similar to Jake’s Magical Market where cards can be combined, upgraded, etc, so we can see some fun theorycrafting on that side. It hasn’t happened yet (unless I somehow missed it?) but I remain hopeful that this is something that might be revealed later on.

It’s a fun read, the world is set up nicely, characters are established, writing is good, I enjoyed it.