The Card Apprentice卡徒

This is a good novel and it deserves its fairly high rating. A lot of people love it. I, unfortunately, do not.

The novel is fairly well written. The characters are interesting and likable. The worldbuilding is also pretty good. And the power system is cool and dynamic. There's a lot there to like, and it was enough to keep me reading even when my frustrations made me want to stop.

But despite its good qualities, it has a number of issues that ruined my enjoyment:

1) It's built on a world where the people in power are heartless, selfish and utterly contemptuous.

Although the bad guys aren't one-dimensional -- they aren't evil just to be evil, and they do have many other aspects to their characters (many of them are even sympathetic, with nuanced motivations and character developments) -- they are absolutely vile to anyone who isn't part of their group. They won't hesitate to steal, murder, or enslave, or to wipe out entire families or worse; and the lives of regular and innocent people are absolutely worthless to them.

I might have even liked many of this novel's antagonists if they weren't so unapologetically evil. An example of this is if two such people decide to fight, they won't hesitate to do it right over a residential area, casually killing hundreds or thousands of innocent people when they could have easily taken their fight elsewhere.

2) Nearly every conflict the MC faces occurs because of some long series of unrealistic coincidences or misunderstandings.

Although the MC attempts to keep a low profile (he's often very very bad at doing that) he will inevitably catch the attention of someone he can't afford to offend, often for reasons so absurdly coincidental it strains disbelief. Rather than allow the MC to develop normally and engage in conflicts that he draws himself into; he's instead forced into conflicts seemingly out of nowhere just so he can be in a constant state of perpetual danger.

3) The MC is almost always the underdog.

He's ridiculously overpowered in many ways. But to counter that, nearly every group that targets him is overwhelmingly more powerful than he can possibly deal with at that time. He's constantly forced to hide or disguise himself, until he eventually becomes strong enough to actually face the people targeting him. But before he even reaches that point, a new, even more powerful group will inevitably target him; repeating the cycle ad nauseum.

TL:DR - This would be a top-tier novel for me if it weren't so frustrating to read.