Your Market Is the Run
Most deckbuilders give you a deck and let you tweak it between battles. Contested Space is different. The thing you're growing across a run is your market, not your deck. The deck is what you assemble out of the market in combat every turn.
Between battles you add cards to your market, upgrade the cards already in it, and reshape what your future hands could look like. When combat begins, you draft from your market in real time, cards rotate through it every turn, forcing a constant trade-off: spend now for firepower, or invest in something that'll matter three turns from now.
Every fight is a deckbuilding exercise. You're not playing a finished deck against an encounter, you're racing to build the right deck for that encounter, out of the market you've spent the run shaping.
