Deckmaster: Apocalypse Business (Card-System Apocalypse)

Self-Published

Community Rating

Description

What you're in for: a slow-burn story with deckbuilding, capitalism, corporate alien shenanigans, and confusion. Not everything will be explained right away. MC is human-to-superhuman and rags to riches, but not overnight. The scale starts small but grows epic.

CradlemeetsDungeon Crawler Carl.

Noah was just a normal shopkeeper when the world was remade, transforming his cozy town of Byron Bay into the newest, adrenaline-fueled playground for power-hungry prospectors hailing from across the Corporate Civilizations.

Thrust headfirst into a brutal, high-stakes world where murder is a spectator sport, Noah must scramble to decipher the bewildering rules of his transformed world.

He’ll face gruesome monsters, corporate lawyers, ruthless moguls, cursed towers, and living dungeons. And, worst of all, taxes.

To survive, he'll need to hone his strengths, outsmart his competition, and accumulate power and wealth unimaginable in his previous, tranquil existence.

Wealth is coming along nicely, but it’s hard to grow your powers when you end up stuck with all of them.

Information

Status: Hiatus
Year: 2023
Author: Sinter

Royal Road Stats

Rating: 3.5/ 5.0
Followers: 594
Views: 174,167

Chapters(52 total)

Reviews

No reviews yet. Be the first to share your thoughts!

Community Reviews(4)

AlsoJohnRoyal Road
★★★★★ 4.5
The apocalypse hits Australia and like everything else tries to kill Australians. This one's a corporate apocalypse and as such has been spit balled, corporate spoke and copycatted for millennia. Our clueless hero is used to a naturally hostile environment and blunders entertainly onward. I read 11 chapters before noticing "only 3 stars?". That's wrong. So I wrote the review. It's not deep but it's a very good read
Fogge75Royal Road
★★★★★ 4.5
Didnt come with great expectations. And I have to say the start was a bit bumpy but also pretty fun. The foray into viewpoint of known leaders in the world was a bit awkward but after that the story gained traction.
Special plus for getting the feel that the MC is really lost with all the changes. Something many others skip over.
I havent made it to the part where abilities and cards start to be used. But i like the setup alot so far. Its a good pace in the start. Not jumping to fast into action, but neither is it slow or complicated.
I think its fresh, not mainstream and worth a read.
impRoyal Road
★★★ 3.0
Deckmaster is a fairly unique entry into the system apocalypse genre, not so much because of the setting and system, but because of the author's attempt at using narrative devices we don't see used often in webnovels, especially this subgenre.
The basic setup is one you have probably seen before: system apocalypse shows up, shortly thereafter the pov character ends up in a dungeon/tower, and his actions are watched on a broadcast by aliens and humans alike. While this is called Cardmaster, the cards aren't really a card game. They're more like artifacts that are collected to progress. More HWFWM and less Yugioh.
The story has a rocky start, both because the narrative devices I mentioned before do not get introduced very smoothly and because of the regular exposition dumps by way of Q and A sessions between the protagonist and whatever available side character is around to explain things. It's not graceful and it both hurts the pacing of early chapters and makes the narrative devices more confusing.
The author has been very ambitious by nesting an unreliable narrator retelling events within a frame story. In some ways it seems like the writer may have bitten off more than they can chew. It is hard to keep track of more complex narratives like this and it is understandable that things are a bit rocky, especially early on where it isn't yet clear what is going on with the narrative. It's all far from unreadable, although you might find the transitions disorienting and the narrative threads difficult to track. These are problems which can be fixed with editing. I suspect the reason we don't see these narrative devices often in web serials is they require a lot of planning and reworking to get right, not to mention they're tricky to pop into for just a single chapter here and there.
To summarize: pretty rough start, but author is attempting something a bit different, so an extra half star for that. Story will likely improve significantly as the author gets more skilled
argusthecatRoyal Road
★★ 1.5
I don’t want to be too down on someone who’s making a foray into writing. Being discouraging is the last thing I want; I want more authors and more stories and more weird art.
That said? This story is borderline incoherent. Personally, I’ve chosen to dip out around the time we’re seeing the PoV of both Kim Jong Un and also possibly a drunken Kevin McCarthy? Maybe you will get farther than I will, if so, please PM me to tell me how the story handles McCarthy’s ousting from his role as speaker of the house.
There’s a lot of problems here, but just as an example, let’s look at the very, very start. The story starts with the protagonist talking to someone that we, as the audience, don’t see. Then it lampshades the nature of an in media res opening. Then it goes back in time, framed as a story being told, Then it goes back in time further to the actual start of the narrative. This feels like the author wanted to try a dozen different ideas for certain tropes or storytelling structures, but they all got mixed up and jammed together in the process. It doesn’t work, and it makes the whole thing difficult to read.
I think that this story needs, at least for the first few chapters, a complete overhaul to be readable. And I do hope the author does that at some point. I think there’s a seed here of something, and if they wrote all this then that indicates a passion for trying to get that story seed out. But it needs a lot of work.