That's where I was going as well, LISP style and APL style claims "reads left to right" but having to build up a stack of buffered work which you can only unwind once you get to the end, is annoying and unhelpful and limiting.

But simply turning it around to cards.shuffle().deal(4) isn't a good answer, it's still the case that you can only put a small number of things together in a chain because it stops making sense. If the next move was to start the game, "cards.shuffle().deal(4).startgame('some-card-game')" does not make sense because starting the game is not something the cards do, but "start(deal(shuffle(cards), 4), 'some-card-game')" can make sense because start is a function which takes a board state and a game to start. It describes the world state, not the cards and their abilities.

That is, neither style is right, but a mixed style where both approaches are available and you can mix and match to be more expressive, works much better, IMO. Chunking a small number of things with prefix into one operation, or with postfix into one operation, but combining those chunks flexibly at a larger scale.