Basic questions about the game

1. Are you planning on a completely PvP free game, a game with some PvP areas (either arena / ladder type combat or areas that can't be accessed without risking PvP), or something else?

2. Are you planning on having any guild vs. guild competitive activities? Whether that means some kind of direct warring (I assume that would be highly problematic with a card-based combat system involving lots of players) or a weekly / monthly / event type competition?

3. The other side of the coin, any thought towards collaborative projects where players can work together? Building a bridge to get to a new part of the world, providing food for a massive village to let you use their land, providing a number of potions and scrolls to a tribe for them to discover new patterns that did not previously exist or let you gather new materials that weren't available before, fighting an enormously powerful monster, etc...

Just in case you hadn't considered these q's already or in case it might impact how you build things from early on.

1.
I want to implement a PvP system. I'd probably create it like the Battle Arena in Drakor, where you can, instead of searching for NPCs, find a PvP enemy which is around your "rating" and then fight against him.
I'm not sure if this should be "live-fight" so both persons need to be online because this can be very frustrating early on with very low amount of players but would be cool later on
OR if you would setup an "Offline strategy" where, when you get attacked, you will cast the spells you've configured in a static way. (This way your enemy can always react to your spells but not the other way around)
I'll probably implement the latter for now as long as the game won't have a huge player base.

2.
I haven't planned out anything yet, I'll look into it more down the line.

3.
The idea of a community project to unlock new areas sounds awesome, but again, I'll need a decent infrastructure in order to make this happen.
I'll consider something once I'm at a point where this makes sense to implement.

For 1., a live fight would be pretty cool as just an option for when people are online together (rather than the only way people could do PvP, seeing as most people are in afk mode most of the time). Or maybe set up tournaments at various times to try and entice people to be online. A lot of potential there for different ways of implementing that down the road.