That's just... ridiculous.
You'd rather have there be only 13 different types of decks?
Mono-decks are good, but they aren't the point. Most cards synergize best with cards in other elements, leading to new decks and new combinations. If Darkness cards were only useful to a mono-darkness deck, then why play any deck involving darkness which isn't mono?
No.
What actually is ridiculous is having less than 10 cards to choose from for mono decks.
Until that has been dealt with, making cards that are only playable if a specific two elements out of 12 are played, will only strengthen rainbow, which is already way too widely played, exactly because the best cards need two elements to work.
My problem is not that this card is useful for darkness-earth, my problem is that this card is completely useless to anything else.
A mono-darkness card would be useful in mono-darkness, in addition to darkness+earth, darkness+time, darkness+aether, darkness+anything else. It would be useful for 14 different decks, instead of just two (dark+earth and rainbow, which has better cards anyway so won't use it).
Is an 5/3 creature for 5 quanta considered good? No. Life has those for 2 or 3, I think... Playable? Not really, dragons are better. Quanta carries over to next turn anyway, so playing one 10 atk dragon instead of two 5 atk gargoyles is superior is nearly all cases, because it costs less cards, has more life so is harder to kill, shields can't reduce it twice only once, it is better with liquid shadow, or any other buff spells, etc...
Is there ANY serious deck out there that play abominations? Because this card is the same, except it is easier to kill because it has less life.
If it is a lot better when upgraded, then it might be worth playing in mono-darkness, but at the moment, it isn't known how it will be when upgraded.
Even so, compared to a vampire (4/3 for the same cost, and you gain 4 life per turn), a creature of a similar cost and size, but without an ability, is useless, and this has no ability if you aren't playing earth quanta...
Maybe if the upgraded version is 5/3 for 2 quanta instead of 5...
Look at Devourers. Do Darkness decks find them useful? Yes. Do Earth/Darkness decks find them useful? Another yes. Do they work in a Darkness/Earth deck? Yes #3.
The major difference here is that
-Devourers have an ability even without burrow, and a pretty powerful one at that
-You almost never want to use the burrow ability anyway
-They generate quanta, so they kinda act as pillar replacements too, making them a lot easier to include than other cards.
Devourer is a nice mono-darkness card, this one isn't. This one is an 5/3 creature without an ability, that isn't something I'd want to include in darkness, which actually happens to have more useful cards than other elements.
What would you prefer in your deck, 6 of these, or 3 dragons that do the same thing for you, and 3 more spaces to add more steals, drain lifes, shards, or pillars?
Duo decks are the biggest part of the game, and there are much more functional duo decks than mono and trio put together. Rainbows are all based off the same concept, and really only have 3 categories, control, speed, and a mix of both.
They aren't the biggest part because it is intended that way, they are because of the dual color cards. Let's face is, mono-color isn't used because there are not enough cards for it.
Dual color however, is bad because it needs a lot more work on developer side, which is obviously impossible at the moment.
If you'd want to add 10 new cards to every dual color deck combination to select from, you have these choices as a designer :
-Make 660 new dual-color cards, 10 each for every combination.
-Make 120 new mono-color cards, 10 each for every element. This saves you roughly 80% of the work, and these cards also strengthen mono-color decks.
-Make 10 new cards, each of them colorless (other), that can be used in any deck. Of course, this is where you have to be the most careful, as these cards are a major part of the game. Making them powerful (like SoG), will change the game environment drastically.
Now, this card, unless it is a lot stronger when upgraded, falls to the first option, which is an amount of work impossible with only one developer in a reasonable time.
So, mono color, and colorless cards should be the priority...to get the most out of your work.
