Jotting this down here bc I found the idea really fascinating and I'd like to maybe think about it again some time.
So, had some interesting dreams last night that spanned a lot of different topics (including receiving some really wonderful jewelry - thanks again, you know who you are :3) but one thing that came up that I've been chewing on this afternoon is this kart racing game I was playing. It was like a p standard kart racer in a lot of ways, similar to Super Mario Kart or Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart; but what stuck out to me was it had a deck-building mechanic to it, where like before each race you'd have a deck of cards you'd put together and draw from when you passed through the item blocks. P standard deckbuilding type cards that interacted with the basic game mechanics - playable cards that would like fire attacks or boost or whatnot, and also stuff like "when you hit a banana peel, gain 1 coin", stuff like that.
So, like, first off, it's undoubtedly inspired by me getting hella into Netrunner these past few months. But, I've been thinking all afternoon about how feasible this would be to implement now. (Baseline game dev stuff aside ofc; thinking from a purely game mechanic point.)
The hardest thing would be balancing the deckbuilding to be complex enough to be interesting and meaningful, but still intuitive enough to interact with while driving. Probably some basic cards that are included in most every deck (analogous to, say, having the basic treaure and victory cards in Dominon) and then additional cards that are chosen to supplement/interact with those cards (comparable to the Kingdom cards in Dominion).
Perhaps also each racer could have some innate ability that interacts as well and which shapes playstyle and deck shape, similar to how Netrunner IDs influence how the player builds their deck.
Anyway, iunno, don't really have the game dev capability to manifest something like this I don't think, but the idea's really fascinating to me the more I think about it. Maybe something to keep in the back pocket and whisper in the right person's ear someday, who knows.