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The new competition will further blur the marketing lines between the older travel-and-entertainment cards like American Express, which grew up specializing in hotels, airlines, rental cars and restaurants, and the bank cards that originally focused on local retail purchases. Citicorp and other big banks that have been moving into cards and checks on a nationwide scale argue that they have been forced to do so in self-defense, claiming they have lost a lot of consumer credit business since World War II to other loan suppliers, including not only the card firms but department-store charge accounts and the auto-finance subsidiaries of the car companies. Insists a top bank executive: "There is no war going on. That would imply that someone must win and someone must lose." But there surely will be a lot of bruising. -