Erannorth Chronicles is Mount and Blade or Battle Brothers, but with card battling instead of M1+back and forth atop a ladder for ten minutes or telling obese tactical dudes to camp and hold their spears out for 20 turns. It is a far cry from the roguelite deckbuilders you are familiar with, and much closer to the other two games in scale, power growth, time investment, and game flow, but Erannorth Chronicles blows both out of the water in terms of scope of the card part of the game, not to knock M&B or BB for what THEY do well, but Erannorth models a truly baffling amount of content within the card battling.
I am not kidding. You can be an angel paladin burning heretics, you can be a demonic witch hexing and controlling enemies amassing a coven of ally witches, you can be a foppish noble dwarf with an army of disposable soldiers using his wealth to crush the enemies, a half vampire hunting vampires, a demon alchemist, you be a dancer or con artist that charms and tricks enemies, there are more combos than I can count with totally exclusive card pools, synergies, and mechanics, all with proper theming and meaningful gameplay differences, at least as much as throwing cards at jpg enemies can be meaningful. It would take me hundreds of hours of play to sample even half of what this game has to offer in terms of archetypes to even have some understanding of what is good or bad. It is insane what this game models. For all this variety though, the game remains fairly elegant; the loot pools only drop what you can use, so a quick glance at the card packs your character has and you can identify often what skills would be good and choose to discard what skills you don't to thin the loot pool. Once you cross the initial hurdle of learning, the game is fairly easy to pick up.
The card battling has you construct a deck and battle to find an ever increasing array of cards to improve your deck dropped from all the various battle gauntlet quests you can engage in. Equipment is cards, which if equipped show up in your hand every single turn. Potions and consumables are cards, which you can chuck in your "backpack" to pull as a sideboard in the event you need them. The cards themselves are packed with synergies, the next card gets +1 multicast, +2 dmg, everything synergizes with something else or does two or three things and within your character's archetypes you have many different ways to take your build and focus, and depending on what zones have what resistant enemies, sometimes you might need to take all the disused cards you have amassed and make a second deck with a different focus to get through a tough challenge. Every game mode also tweaks large parts of the game; you can run a linear series of dungeons, you can put the campaign on a timer and restrict shops, you can make every single dungeon on the map a single run only, this game is happy to disassemble and reassemble itself any number of ways to provide a variety of ways to approach this card battling. Now, this means of course it will never be as tight or as elegant as a Monster Train, but it is, at least ostensibly, a big open world RPG-themed M&B style game of immense growth in power scale, and in that matter it succeeds.
If I had to charge the game with some weaknesses, it is that the text quests in the towns are fairly silly (Those might come from the DLCs, I cannot possibly identify what comes from what DLC and this game is so enormous few people probably can either) and that one of the core mechanics of the game is modifying enemy intent by dropping them below HP thresholds, but you only get to see enemy intent if your "account" has beaten that enemy before, unless you use some cheat to unlock them all, but that just means your first couple runs are warm ups anyway, and in a game with this much content that's understandable.
This game fits perfectly right next to all your other autismal forever games like BB, COE, Dominions, etc, and is a wonderful piece of work.
EDIT: Here, let me just give you an elevator pitch as to HOW MUCH STUFF is in this game. The Pirate class has the following subclasses that all have distinct card packs and perk sets:
Buccaneer
Gunslinger
Cutthroat
Swashbuckler
Treasure Hunter
Dread Captain
