Deck construction board games put the interesting work before the game starts. You are not drafting cards as you play. You are arriving with a list you built, and finding out whether the choices you made an hour ago hold up under pressure.
That is a very particular pleasure, and the design question for deck construction board games is how to give players real freedom without producing a thousand-card research project.
The trait solution to deck construction
The elegant answer is to gate the card pool by identity rather than by cost.
Trials of MAYA, out on Gamefound September 8, 2026, does this with three traits per champion.
What is Trials of MAYA?
Trials of MAYA is an expandable card-driven arena combat game. It combines three genres: MOBAs, classic 90s tactics games, and TCGs without booster packs. It plays 1 to 4 players in 60 to 180 minutes for ages 14 and up, with nine asymmetric champions and 340-plus cards.
Every champion belongs to one of seven species and is trained in two of eight classes. Those three traits are its identity, and they are also the deck construction rule: a card is legal for that champion if it shares at least one of those traits, or if it is a signature card naming that champion specifically.
So the pool is shared, but your slice of it is not. A vaanar vanguard and a naag artificer are drawing from the same 340-plus cards and will never build the same deck.
The construction rules
The constraints are short enough to hold in your head.
Decks contain 24 to 40 cards. At least ten of them must be action cards, the ones that go onto your three-slot action mat and drive your turns. You may include up to two copies of any card, and only one copy of each signature card.
Beyond action cards, two other types compete for space. Relic cards slot under your action slots to augment them, unlocking additional actions or effects. Spell cards are one-shot effects played directly from your hand, useful for reacting to something you did not see coming.
That balance is the core deckbuilding decision: how much of your list is engine, how much is enhancement, and how much is insurance.
Why the trait gate works
Three reasons this approach beats an open pool.
It makes lore mechanical. Species and class descriptions are also rules summaries. Garudas fly and hit hard from range, so a garuda’s legal cards look like that. You can predict a champion’s options from its story.
It keeps the exercise finite. A new player is choosing from a manageable subset rather than the entire box, which means a first deck takes minutes rather than an evening.
It preserves identity. Signature cards ensure that a champion cannot be built into something unrecognisable, no matter how you tune the rest.
Every champion also ships with a ready-made starter deck, which is where reviewers recommend beginning before you start cutting cards.
Deck construction versus deck-building
Worth being precise, because the terms get used interchangeably and mean different things.
Deck-building games have you acquire cards during play, as in Dominion or Clank. Deck construction games have you build before play and then pilot what you brought, as in most competitive card games. Trials of MAYA is the second kind.
The practical difference is where the skill lives. In deck-building, adaptation during the game is the skill. In deck construction board games, preparation is the skill, and execution tests whether your preparation was right.
No gambling required
One more thing that matters for anyone who has built decks competitively before. The full card list is public before preorder, box contents are fixed at print, and there are no booster packs, no random pulls and no crowdfunding-exclusive gameplay cards. You are solving a construction problem with complete information, which is the version of the exercise worth doing.
Rulebooks and public metadata are on BoardGameGeek, the full breakdown is on the official page, and there is a Tabletop Simulator build for testing a list before you commit to it.
Follow or back Trials of MAYA on Gamefound.