Half of the super basic combat system works! For testing purposes, whenever a player clicks the Explore button, combat is initiated with my good ol’ pal Test Dummy. Yep, that bag of straw and anger is back to take another kicking. 
Once in combat the player’s starting hand get’s drawn. When a card is used it’s cardPower is deducted from the Test Dummy’s health. This continues until the Test Dummy has no health left to lose, at which point the combat window is closed and the player is given a random reward.
Like the patient dummy he is, Test Dummy doesn’t fight back yet. That’s next on the agenda, I can tell he’s itching to strike back… or maybe the itching is from the straw… I’m so corny.
How to handle the Deck, Hand, and Discard
I spent a long time thinking about the best way to handle this aspect of the combat system. The inventory system already has the player’s deck as a Dictionary with a Card as the key and the Quantity as the value for each row and at first I thought I could just use this Dictionary as the deck in combat as well. First I tried to give the Card class a inHand and inDiscard boolean property. The idea was to just toggle these boolean values as the card moved from deck to hand to discard and back to deck again. This quickly became apparent that it wouldn’t work easily and that it would be best if each card had its own row meaning having 2 Punch cards would result in having 2 rows in the Deck array.
So I switched to a List, no big deal. At the start of combat the Combat Manager loops through the deck dictionary and turns it into a deck list. Now I could just look through the list for cards that have inHand and inDiscard booleans set to false and I can draw one of them!
Wait, no, that kinda sucks too! Doing that would make randomly selecting a card difficult as i’d always have to check to see if the card selected was inHand or inDiscard, if it was in either of those places, select another random card and keep doing that until an available card was found. Laaaame!
So the inHand and inDiscard boolean idea was scraped too and two new Lists were added, the Hand List and the Discard List. Now, a random card could be selected and removed from the deck list and added to the hand list. No having to make sure a card in the deck list was currently in the player’s hand. If a card was in the deck and was available to be drawn!
So there I was, spending all this time thinking up the right way to do it, the when I started implementing what I thought was the right, it turned out to be very wrong and the right thing fell right into my lap. I’m a little embarrassed I didn’t think of it sooner!