In working on a game like this. I made you take damage to your deck and if you take damage on an empty deck you lose but if you draw from it you get to shuffle your discard in. It allows for a lot of cards that read simple but have a lot of implications. It lets you draw a lot of cards without it just being upside too which is neat.

Positioning in action games is cool because you’re manipulating like 3 variables simultaneously in a very intuitive way. I think if you want to replicate this feel it’s better to have people care about number of cards in certain zones like the hand or discard because that is what is intuitive to cards. Moving a card between zones also tends to manipulate multiple variables at once so that’s upside.