There's a game called Vanguard that had an interesting card game system. The simple version is players would play against the guards around the city and after a certain number of wins were reached, all the players in and around the city would be granted some temporary bonus.

Here, it could be something as simple as players running around playing against various NPCs in one of the starting cities (or at the surrounding camps), granting bonuses to everyone in the area for a few hours. Or it could be, each city competes against each other and at the end of the week the results are tallied and the winning city gains a certain prestige and subtle bonus for that week: enhanced anima regen for city members, lower teleportation costs, whatever. Nothing game breaking but some small perk to encourage a healthy competition between the cities.

Then there are tournaments, leaderboards (top 20 get GC seals or some reward at the end of the week), and all sorts of things to entice people to continue to play and improve their deck. I'm not opposed to each creature having a small chance of dropping their card, allowing people to trade, farm, sell cards. Or even DoL and DoH getting a chance to get cards as well as they do their thing.


But honestly, it boils down to how the game is designed before we can worry about how to entice people to continue playing it. It needs to be fast, responsive and something that can be completed in a minute or two. (Ideally, in under a minute.)

Parley is a great example of not how to do it. It was slow, clunky and made little to no sense. And when you were finished playing it, you had nothing to show for your efforts.