For example, the player in Slay the Spire can gain relics that provide permanent effects for the character as rewards from defeating powerful enemies, and the deck-building strategy subsequently will be tied to synergizing the effects of cards with the power of these relics.
Enemies typically follow more straight-forward combat, attacking, defending, or applying buffs and debuffs to themselves or the player.
A player can improve themselves in a roguelike deckbuilder by learning from their past mistakes and finding new combinations of cards and effects that can help them succeed.
While Garfield had played more traditional deck-building games before, he stated of Dream Quest, "I became completely hooked when I realized that you really had to build a well rounded deck.
Most deck building games reward you for picking a strategy and following it to the absolute exclusion of anything else.
[6] While other roguelike deck-building games emerged following Dream Quest such as Hand of Fate, the genre gained more attention with Slay the Spire, which was developed by Megacrit.
[9] By April 2024, over 850 games on Steam were tagged as roguelike deck-builders, showing significant growth in this genre.
Among attributes creating popularity in the genre, as identified by Ars Technica, are its relative simplicity for developers to create through prototyping and testing of ideas and not requiring a large amount of artistic assets, a large amount of room for introduction of new gameplay and narrative genre ideas to the field, its ease of promotion through live streaming of playthroughs which often bring new players to the games, their high replayability due to the roguelike nature, the ease for players to pick up and put down the game in short periods to consider strategy, if desired, and their lower cost to play compared to traditional physical trading card games like Magic: The Gathering.