Greetings....

      So I am brand new here (don't beat me up too much) and I am brand new to GM'ing a Mutants and Masterminds group.
I have been reading into the various manuals and I see one suggestion that uses playing cards (poker style) instead of dice.
Has anyone out there ever used this over die rolls? (gasp) Meh, the other quandry I am running into is finding someone out there
who has run this game based on one primary storyline and how did you find the flow. I wanted to put together a test one-shot to
see what's what but not sure if this will be a practical result model. Has anyone out there started a game with a one-shot test run?

I played with cards once. Not M&M but house rules. Western setting. Crap.

Players had to draw as many cards as their score and match a poker figure according to difficulty.
In opposing tests, both draw cards and the highest poker figure wins. A player could call the opponent who had to accept or refuse: if he refuses the caller wins without showing his cards, if he accepts cards are shown and whoever wins makes a critical.

Like I said it wasn't that good for two reasons:

1) Poker figure probabilities are not practical: there is a huge gap between drawing 2 or 3 cards and it gets worse beyond. Thus it is hard to set a medium difficulty level: it ends up to be quite impossible for low scores (1 card) and too easy for high scores (3 cards, rarely more).

2) drawing cards, dicarding them, shuffling when the deck's over, etc. It dramatically reduces the pace of the game fast action sequences (read: combat, that would never happen in the wild west, uh). I kept the system as simple as possible and it was still bulky. In fact, dice are extrmely time-efficient: grab and drop.

The second drawback is the most important one so I suspect it would apply to any system involving cards, in fact dice are extrmely efficient: grab and drop. So would advise them only in situations of extremely narrative roleplaying where testing is scarce.

You might want to just drop the whole poker idea anyway and use the cards simply as dice substitute, except players can now 'construct' their roll from their hand of cards, based on the numerical values (ditch face cards, perhaps keep jokers to represent criticals). Less fluke, more player investment in actions.