All the Skills Review: S-Low (Through Book 5), And the Cleanest Entry Point to Deck-Builder LitRPG

The pitch

All the Skills is a deck builder, and if you grew up on Magic: The Gathering, Pokemon, or Yu-Gi-Oh, you already understand the hook. Magic in this world lives in cards. People slot them into their bodies, build decks inside themselves, and the rarer the card, the better the ability. Everyone's heard of legendaries; nobody's sure they exist, because who would advertise owning one? That system is married to dragon riding, and the honest pitch is exactly that simple: you're building magic decks and riding dragons into battle. It's super fun.

A note on scope: this review covers books one through five. Book six just released and is in my queue; I'll add to this when I've finished it.

The origin, done at the right speed

Arthur is born in the scourge lands, the place where criminals, deadbeats, and anyone who displeased the wrong noble get sent to mine until the scourge, this world's plague, finishes them. His path from getting his first card to getting smuggled out is creative and well written, and more importantly for me, it moves. You spend the opening chapters with his childhood rather than half a book, and then the story gets him to the city where the real plot lives. Nothing about the origin is ground nobody's walked before, but it's polished, it's earned, and it's fast. That's the trade I'll take every time.

What the card system does for the story

Two things, and they're both structural. First, no grinding. There are no levels to farm, so nobody spends chapters slaughtering boars; dragon riders are effectively a military force, training happens, and the plot keeps moving through it. Every book advances the story. Filler is close to nonexistent.

Second, and this is the underrated part: because cards are power, cards are also currency, security, and motive. The nobility hoards them, banks vault them, and anyone visibly carrying one is a target, because killing the bearer gets you the card. So under the story's PG-13-to-light-R surface sits a genuinely cutthroat world where the veneer of civility tears easily when someone thinks they can get away with taking everything you have. There's even an event, the closest the series comes to a dungeon arc, where anyone can gamble their life for a shot at cards they'd never touch otherwise. And the writing around it is very human: people are spectacular at looking at lethal odds and deciding the statistics apply to other people. As someone who dislikes dungeon arcs on principle, I'll report this one worked, partly because it's the only one.

The one soft spot: I'm not sure the system's limits are ever nailed down. Heart decks are intrinsic, tools stretch capacity a bit, and exactly how many cards a person can run stays conveniently flexible. Honour Rae clearly wanted room to maneuver. It never bothered me enough to matter, but crunch-lovers should know the numbers stay fuzzy.

Arthur, the hustler

Arthur is well written and, for me, occasionally frustrating, and I want to be careful about which of those is the book's fault. He's a hustler. He came from dirt, scraped for everything, and even when life stabilizes he's always working an angle, always trying to make a buck off a situation. He reminds me of the street peddlers in Manhattan who buy a case of water at Costco for five bucks and sell the bottles for a dollar or two on a hot day. Honest work, real profit, a lot of effort for small money, and if you need it to get by, more power to you. That's Arthur's operating system in everything.

Where it rubbed me: there are moments where his friends clearly value his company and he'd rather be out making money, and since I hold the opposite view, nothing matters more than your people, watching him choose the hustle felt a little grimy. But that's my values talking, not the craft. His choices are consistent with who he is and what survival taught him, and a character being unlike me is not a flaw. Noting it anyway, in case you share my wiring.

The fans vs. me

Two things the community grumbles about, and where I land on each. First, the venue changes: the story relocates its entire setting, new city, new players, new politics, twice in back-to-back stretches, right after Arthur spends books climbing the social ladder somewhere else. Friends I talk books with found that frustrating, and I get it; you invest in a place and the story moves out from under you. For me it's handled well and serves the larger plot, so I'm neutral, but be warned it happens.

Second, the foreshadowed direction of the later books. It's not subtle; the story is clearly leaning toward one of two places, and some friends of mine are not thrilled about the likelier one. I'm indifferent so far. What I'll say in the series' defense is that this is planned trajectory, not expectation-subversion, and there's a big difference. When an author swerves purely because the audience guessed the destination, you get the show Lost: all the groundwork stops adding up and something great turns into a mess. All the Skills isn't doing that. The road was laid books ago; some people just don't like where it goes.

Where it ranks

S-low, and the reasoning is worth spelling out because it sounds harsher than it is. Everything here is done well: writing, characters, pacing, world, and Luke Daniels narrating is his usual reliable self. What it lacks is the one thing nobody's seen before. Deck building is fresh-ish, dragon riders are a theme as old as the genre's bones, and they're common because they're awesome, but a true peak series needs everything, including something that's distinctly its own. This has most things, executed very well, and nothing wholly new. That's an S-tier floor, not a ceiling; if the back half of the series turns its foreshadowing into something special, the tier moves up.

Verdict

Absolutely worth the credit, and a specific recommendation: if you've never done a deck builder, start here. It was one of my first with cards as the entire magic system, and it's the cleanest introduction to the sub-genre I know. Fun system, dragons with real personality, a plot that never stalls. I hope you enjoy it.