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

Why this is the deck-builder entry point

If you've been curious about deck-builder LitRPG — the subgenre that treats card-game mechanics as the spine of the magic system rather than as flavour — All the Skills is the cleanest way in.

The pitch is exactly what the subgenre name implies. Magic in this world is cards. Characters acquire them, slot them into decks they carry inside themselves (a Heart Deck for the cards they've internalised, plus a Side Deck of situational tools), and the rarity, synergy, and configuration of those cards is the entire progression system. There are no levels. There are no stat blocks. There are no XP grinds. If you've played Magic: The Gathering, Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh, Hearthstone, or any of their digital descendants, the mechanic clicks within two chapters and you stop noticing it's a mechanic.

This is the entry-point recommendation specifically because the genre vocabulary tax is so low. A reader landing on Primal Hunter without LitRPG context is looking at a long tutorial dungeon and a wall of stat prompts; a reader landing on All the Skills with no LitRPG context is looking at a card-game system they already understand, deployed in a fantasy world that explains itself fluently. The series is genuinely accessible in a way that most current S-tier LitRPG isn't.

One small note before going further: the precise limits on how many cards a character can use at once are kept deliberately flexible by the author. There's a soft ceiling rather than a hard rule, and Honour Rae leans into the flexibility for narrative reasons. I noticed it and flagged it as a thing to track; it isn't a flaw. The system has texture without being load-bearingly mechanical, and the texture is the point.

A note on scope

This review covers Books 1 through 5. Book 6 just released and I haven't read it yet — the series is still ongoing. When I read Book 6, I'll come back and add an addendum noting whether the latest book moves the tier rating in either direction. The S-low grade below is anchored on the run through Book 5, where the series is at its consistent baseline best.

The origin — fast, executed, not summarised

Arthur Rowantree grows up in the Scourgelands — the region the kingdom uses as a disposal site for criminals, the dishonoured, and anyone unlucky enough to land on the wrong side of nobility. The local petty tyrant running things is Baron Kane, a minor character whose role is mostly confined to making Arthur's origin worth escaping from. The deal is straightforward and grim: you go there, you work, you eventually die of the Scourge — a plague-like disease that's effectively the region's defining feature.

Arthur isn't a street urchin and he isn't a beggar. He's the more interesting character archetype of a street-smart wheeler-dealer, a kid who learned to find angles, leverage, and opportunity in conditions designed not to allow any of them — and there's a structural reason for the savvy. His father is Calvan Rowantree, an exiled duke, sent to the Scourgelands the same way the criminals are. Arthur isn't peasant-stock; he's fallen-noble stock, raised in the dispossessed-aristocracy mode where you remember which forks are which but you don't have anything else to eat off them. The wheeler-dealer competence reads as inherited and trained, not lucked-into — and the series is better for it.

The opening covers Arthur's first card acquisition through his escape from the Scourgelands, and the writing does the thing I want most in LitRPG openers and rarely get: it executes the origin rather than summarising it. The first card matters, the escape matters, the early loyalties matter — but Honour Rae doesn't spend two books on the setup. The Scourgelands sequence is fast, structurally clean, and over in the right amount of time. By the back third of Book 1 we're into the main run of the story with the foundation properly laid.

This is rare. The genre's most common opening failure is the inverse — a tutorial dungeon that stretches across half of Book 1, or a backstory padded out into multiple books. All the Skills gets the origin done with craft and moves.

Cards as world-building, not just mechanics

The single sharpest world-building move in All the Skills is letting the card system shape the society, not just the combat.

If cards are the most valuable thing in the world — and they are — then the rest of the world rationally organises itself around that fact. Nobles hoard cards the way other settings hoard gold and territory. Security systems exist specifically to protect card vaults. Killing someone to take their cards is always a live temptation, and the kingdoms keep a civility veneer over a power dynamic that is, structurally, "the highest-stakes economic asset in the world is portable, concealable, and contestable." Honour Rae lets the social pressure of that show through without preaching about it.

The series sits roughly at PG-13 / light-R on violence, but the author makes it clear that the darker elements of this dynamic exist and are real. The honest power-economy texture is what pushes the world-building above the LitRPG baseline. Most LitRPG with a unique magic system treats the magic as a combat layer and lets the surrounding society stay generic-fantasy by default. All the Skills uses its system to ask a societal question — what does a world look like when this is the primary asset class — and answers it with consequence.

The dragon riders, the heist, the lottery

Three structural features worth naming individually.

Dragon riders. The military structure of the world. Becoming one is Arthur's stated long-arc goal, and the dragon-rider thread is the engine the series uses to organise everything from training arcs through political setpieces. The dragons themselves are characters — sometimes funny, sometimes sweet, sometimes hilarious in a way that doesn't undercut their menace when they need to be menacing. Arthur's dragon Brixaby is the central character relationship of the series, and the bond between them is the through-line that pays off the goal-state: Arthur isn't just chasing a station in the world's hierarchy, he's chasing a life with this specific dragon, and the writing earns the difference. The dragon-rider trope is one of fantasy's most-used wells; All the Skills doesn't reinvent it, but the series uses it as well as anyone using it, and the Arthur-Brixaby pairing is the reason.

The heist element. A natural consequence of the world's economics. If cards are the most valuable thing in the world and they're behind security, then the most powerful narrative engine in the world is "smart people figuring out how to get them anyway." The series runs heist-adjacent sequences — not at Ocean's 11 scale, but with the same logic, and the heists make sense as world-building consequences rather than reading as imported genre furniture.

The high-stakes lottery. All the Skills has one major dungeon-equivalent sequence — an event where anyone can enter and compete for cards, at non-trivial risk to their lives. I'm normally allergic to extended dungeon arcs; I made an exception here because this one is embedded in the world's logic. Of course people would gamble their lives for cards that could change everything. The author renders the human psychology of convincing yourself the odds don't apply to you with sharp accuracy. It happens once. It's earned. It works.

Arthur as a wheeler-dealer — consistent, occasionally frustrating

Arthur's personality is consistent with his background, and I want to be honest about how that consistency lands for me personally.

He prioritises making money over spending time with friends, even when those friends clearly value his company. This is consistent with who Arthur is — a kid who learned in the Scourgelands that resources are survival — but it's also a value system I don't share. I'm built the opposite way: family and friends ahead of money, every time. When Arthur picks the deal over the dinner, I find myself wishing he'd reverse the choice.

I want to be clear that this is a character difference, not a writing flaw. Honour Rae renders Arthur consistently, the motivations track from his origin, and the moments where he does choose people over advantage land harder because they're earned. The series isn't built around teaching Arthur to be someone else; it's built around watching Arthur be Arthur in a world that keeps testing his calibration. That's the right call for the story. I just notice the calibration and don't always agree with it.

If you're a reader who's drawn to wheeler-dealer protagonists generally — characters who measure decisions in opportunity cost — you'll find Arthur immediately compelling. If you're more inclined to want him to put the friends first, you'll occasionally chafe. Either way, the character is who he's supposed to be.

Plot movement — quietly excellent

This is the series' under-the-radar strength. Every book advances the plot. No filler. No pointless grinding. No side quests that exist to fill page-count without serving the larger story. The absence of a traditional level-up system is doing real structural work here — there are no "Arthur kills 500 weak monsters to grind to the next tier" stretches, because the system has no tiers to grind to. Training exists, but it's woven in naturally and points at specific things.

The pacing register is calm. It isn't constantly explosive in the way Primal Hunter sometimes is, and it isn't tournament-arc-heavy in the way Defiance of the Fall gets in its mid-run. All the Skills moves steadily forward, every chapter earning its place, and the cumulative effect across the five-book run I've heard is unusually consistent. Some series swing between great-and-slack books; this one stays at a high baseline.

The venue shifts in later books

A second-order honesty note: the story relocates Arthur to new regions of the world — twice in a row, in the later books — as the larger plot demands he see more of it. Some fans have struggled with this, because by Book 3 they've invested in the politics, characters, and dynamics of the original setting, and a relocation forces them to re-acclimate to a new one.

I understand the frustration. I don't share it. The venue shifts are consistent with the larger overarching plot and they're executed well — each new region has its own internal logic, the supporting cast at each location does real work, and the relocations mean something for Arthur rather than reading as the author getting bored of the original setup. If you're a reader who hates having to re-acclimate to new political structures and supporting casts mid-series, All the Skills will ask that of you twice. If you're a reader who likes the world expanding across a long series, you'll enjoy what the relocations do.

The direction the later books are pointing

I'm going to be careful here.

The later books foreshadow a specific future direction for the series. I'm not going to name it — partly because the foreshadowing is the experience the author intended, and partly because the speculation game itself is part of what makes the recent books fun. What I will say is this: the direction can only realistically be one of two things based on what's already happened in the story, and I've talked to fans who don't like either of the two possibilities.

I'm not in that camp. I find the foreshadowed direction continuing to be entertaining no matter which of the two it lands on. But I want to flag the existence of this fan-friction in advance, because it's real and you may encounter it in community discussion.

Two things I'll say explicitly. First: this is foreshadowing, not a cheap twist. The setup has been there for several books. It will not feel like the rug is being pulled when the reveal lands; it will feel like a payoff. Second: if the series finishes by sticking the landing on the foreshadowed direction, the case for revisiting this tier rating upward becomes much stronger.

Where it ranks

S-low through Book 5. The series has almost everything you want — quality prose, tight pacing, strong characters, a fun premise rendered through to its consequences, system clarity that doesn't trade off against narrative momentum, and very few weak stretches across the five books I've heard. I genuinely have to stretch to find flaws, and the ones I find are honest (the soft system limits, Arthur's wheeler-dealer calibration occasionally annoying me, the late-series venue shifts losing some fans) rather than damning.

What keeps it from S-mid is the absence of a single distinctly novel move. Dragon riders are a beloved fantasy staple. Deck-builders as a LitRPG system exist elsewhere. Card-economy world-building is a smart move, but it's not the kind of I've never seen anything like this punch that anchors Dungeon Crawler Carl in S-peak or The Stubborn Skill-Grinder in a Time Loop in its current S-tier conversation. All the Skills is excellent execution of known materials. That's S-low, and it's S-low with room to elevate.

If Book 6 (and whatever comes after it) continues operating at this consistency level — and pays off the foreshadowed direction the later books are pointing at — S-mid is in play. The Book 6 addendum will come back to this page when I've heard it.

Verdict

Absolutely worth the credit. Strong recommendation across the board, but specifically: this is the deck-builder LitRPG you give someone curious about the subgenre. The mechanic is intuitive, the writing is high-floor consistent, the world-building does real work, and the series rewards the time investment without asking the reader to push through a rough opener.

If you want a series that quietly does almost everything right across six books — without a single distinctive thing-you-have-never-seen — this is one of the best of those running today.