They called it a deck in CoM but it wasn't really anything like that and you could always reload to restore the deck outside of those removed by sleights. The reason people don't like CoM, in part at least, is that it required pre-meditated math to determine your deck order and some memorization so you could pull your sleights at will.
Or you can make the game really easy by stacking Zeros at the front and making every other card invariably result in the completely broken Sonic Rave!