I agree with EP's assessment of the story, overall, though I didn't enjoy it quite as much. Light and fairly fluffy, content to move mostly on the surface and plainly. It was fun but kind of forgettable, in the end.
I found the lecture on the magic system to be kind of irritating. It was pretty clear just from the opening paragraph what the rules of the magic were, and thus a lot of Hoyle's discussions and the load of information on all the meanings of the cards and the rules for using them felt kind of unnecessary in terms of the story. (I know "Way of the Wizard" was supposed to have stories that were explicitly about how magic worked, and this is probably why it went into such detail, but I still found it mostly a distraction and would have enjoyed the story more were most of that excised.)
The reference to Hoyle and the Old West setting (or at least Old Southern Midwest) reminded me inextricably of Deadlands, whose card-based magic system I have to say I massively prefer. In Deadlands, Magicians literally play poker with evil spirits, and if they win, they can use the power. The more power, the harder the game is to win, and if you lose too much to the spirits, then they drag you to Hell. Now *that* is a gambling-based magic system! I found the idea of "You get 52 cards, period, ever," to be an uninspiring limitation; it encourages caution and stasis rather than creativity, where it's in the card sharp's best interest to never use the cards unless they had to and to use them in the most straightforward and reliable way they could when they did. It doesn't really make me go, "Ooh, that would be neat to have!" Heck, I get a little antsy just thinking hypothetically about having such a clear limit to magic power. (Whenever I'm playing any games, I get nervous if I don't have my backup stockpiled. I used to squirrel away one of my $500 bills in Monopoly and never, ever use it unless I had to.)