>>25303
Good point. On the first turn, each person is given a hand of five cards (arbitrary, tentative), the person who goes second gets an extra card.
Each person starts with 2 souls (mana). Depending on which tome you have, you collect souls differently (check OP). There are also cards that give you free souls, when played on the field.
You attack the other players tome, getting its HP to zero to win. Things like taunt cards (cant attack enemy tome) and protect cards (auto absorb enemy damage) prevent direct attacks.
The stats on each card are HP, Defense, Attack, and Cost. Cost is how much it costs to summon the card. Attacks are free unless the card says otherwise.
There are cards that can fuse, for example three skeleton cards played will automatically summon a skeleton king if he's in your hand.
Balance is an interesting question because its not entirely figured out yet. For now I'm just going off what is immediately obvious, but I have neat ideas about putting AI bots against one another and automatically adjusting stats based on results. But for now I'm just doing stats manually and waiting for people to call something OP, then change it.