I am playing with the idea of how a "realtime card game" would work. This is just a brainstorm, nothing at all concrete. For a framework to discuss the idea in:

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Start with a "fire and forget" combat system. -- You lock on a target, approach, and start (auto) attacking with your weapon of choice This is the core of many RPG type games. Sometimes you have to repeatedly click to get the "autoattack" effect, but the basic idea of swinging every small amount of time is pretty common. Usually this is augmented with a set of character abilities that the player can activate. The abilities often have costs and features that make one or another better in certain situations, but the set of abilities to choose from is usually set in stone by your character. Instead: Your character has a "deck" of ability "cards". As combat begins, your "hand" starts to fill up. You choose abilities to use from your "hand". Your opponent is nominally doing the same thing.

Thoughts: What this does is take the predictable mechanics of the usual RPG system and generate a random element, represented by which cards you draw into your hand. So every combat wouldn't consist of using the same set of abilities in the same order. You wouldn't know what resources you had to work with until you engaged the creature. Add in some kind of build-up to combat tactics (maybe you have to build up knowledge of your opponents defence style, use this knowledge to create openings, then finally exploit these openings with attacks) to level out the random nature of card drawing, and we may have a combat system that requires reflection on the part of the player. A character's or monster's combat style would be determined by what cards they have in their deck. Possibly a player could have more than one set of cards -- they might even be allowed to switch styles in the middle of a fight (change the deck that they draw from, maybe with some nominal cost, like losing some chances to draw new cards?) Are there any games out there that have a somewhat similar mechanic? I'm thinking a resource build up works nicely in these games, and it makes your deck more than "turn endurance points and cards into damage". Ideally I'd want to reduce the imporance of twitching. Have new cards enter your hand every few seconds, and have a min delay between cards leaving your hand. Resource-generating cards "in play" should generate their resources continuously. Of all the CCG's out there, I'm most familiar with M:tG. I've touched a few others (jihad, a hacking one, garou, a few others) Are there other CCGs with interesting core mechanics out there I should know about, that might work well in a realtime sense? I framed this in the perspective of an RPG because I think RPGs fit well with the Collectable part of Card Games.

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Are there any games out there that have a somewhat similar mechanic?

Its not a videogame, but you might want to check out the pen and paper game "Dragonlance 5th age". The entire game is played without dices, only by playing a special deck of cards. The higher level you have, the more cards you have in your hand. I loved that system, it is very minimalist so that the gameplay is concentrated on the roleplay.