[quote=@SleepingSilence]
I've certainly played more card games than roguelike deck builders. But, Deep Sky Derelicts, Slay The Spire and Hand Of Fate (all have deck building elements.) [s]And I very briefly tried Roguebook recently. Do not recommend.[/s]
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Shit, I haven't played any of those. 

[quote]
(But maybe the mods you played it with, make the actual deckbuilding part more substantive.) 
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It does, but if you don't like rougelites, you aren't going to like it. Especially on the harder difficulties. I like that you aren't always going to get an epic run, and the caveat to that is that sometimes you're not going to win when you have every challenge in the game activated at the same time. 

Also, to reiterate, it's not a true mod. It's an expansion game mode that can't be played until you beat the base game. 

[quote]
I think Inscryption has plenty of elements that help it stand out. (That ARG puzzle sh*t that it included, certainly helped market it through FOMO.) But you can experience it's art style and music (its general aesthetics that make it unique) in a Let's Play. Least in my two cents.
[/quote]

I still don't get the appeal of ARGs, or watching other people play videogames. I did that as a teen and 5 minutes in I had to ask for the controller or go do something else. 

[quote]
How many deck builders (or meta games) have you played / how would Inscryption rank amongst them? 
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Aside from the card games windows ships with, virtually every digital card game I've played has been some type of deck builder. I struggle to name a lot of them because the bulk of what I played was on kongregate just when people were starting to figure out that micro-transactions were a really easy way to make money on a low effort project. Most of these games were just dumbed down versions of "magic the gathering" or "insert other popular card game here." The best ones were fun, the worst ones were whaling farms that required cash to make any real progress. Hearthstones was better than all of them, but it lacked single player options. Shadowverse was awesome, but it did what Hearthstone decided to do and has seasonal cards to keep people playing. I'm sure I've played others, but it's been too long and I can't think of them. Unless a game is absolutely amazing, I tend to forget about it after I played it a year or so ago. My steam library scares me.

But now that I have my steam library up, looks like I also played Card City Nights. I've also played a lot of triple triad in FF14 & 8, if mini games count.

This might surprise you to hear, but "meta games" don't do a whole lot for me. Yes, undertale was a fine game, but that's despite the meta stuff rather than because of it. Most of the time it comes off as an attempt to be silly, or to make a story feel more important than it really is. "Hey guys, this game you're playing is a game!" "Wow, really? I had no idea! Here I thought I was really murdering/getting murdered, but it's all a game! I should have known!" Inscryption dodges this bullet by being just a few layers deep and never truly goes full meta, even if you think it does early/mid game. 

Inscryption is a difficult game to compare to other games because of the way it carries itself. It's not a true meta game, advancing through the main story requires you to step back away from the card game, it just does a lot of things very differently. How many card games even bother to have stuff like stories in them beyond some lore for window dressing? It's also not  the sort of game you can really play pvp like so many others. It's very much you against a dungeon master that plays by different rules than you do. If I had to judge it based on games like it, I'd have to give it a solid 1/1.