Hello!

I am also a major lurker and this is my first post.

I agree, bitcoin is probably not a very good crypto to integrate into your game. I think Ethereum is better for you because you can easily create a crypto currency that can integrate (with a dApp) which has any parameters that you want and it will run on the Ethereum blockchain. Ethereum is a blockchain like bitcoin that has a simple scripting language (like python or javascript) built in.

A project that I am very interested in is PeerPlays. Its going to be a peer to peer decentralized gaming (read gambling) market that will support bitcoin and a bunch of other cryptos at launch next month. They only have one game now, rock paper scissors, but its just a proof of concept, anyone will be able to create games and integrate them into the peerplays network and they will run like dApps on the Ethereum network, but PeerPlays is built on graphine (a la bitshares) and is much more scalable and future proof.

To summarize:
Ethereum - easy and you can create your own coin.
PeerPlays - more difficult but people will be able to trade your cards with a ton of different crypto's

Maybe you could build a concept on Ether and then migrate to PeerPlays or another, more solid network later.