I think it would be awesome to be able to earn foil/alternate art cards somehow. It would give players who had spent the effort getting those special cards something to show for their time, without harming game balance in any way. Something like this could be appropriate to receive every 5k or 10k score, for example. Score doesn't take any skill to obtain, only time, so it would reward dedicated players, regardless of skill level. It would also give something for people to work towards even after upgrading all their cards. Foil art would be easier to do than alternate art. For foil art, it would be possible to code something that applied a particular algorithm to all existing art to make it foil, but for alternate art, someone actually has to create every single unique piece of artwork.
Another idea could be to earn some sort of special play mat background for your field. There could be one for each element plus 'other', and they could have cool battle scenes involving cards from their element, like an armagio smashing things with a titan, or a crimson dragon breathing out a firestorm on a bunch of hapless rustlers. That would also be really cool, but obviously give no in-game advantage. The disadvantage of this is that it would require a skilled artist to make all of those, and that would take time.
I'd also like to see more events where ultra-rares could be won, but I don't think that's going to happen any time soon, since those require actual people to run them, volunteering their time to host the events. It would be nice if more of the events we already have gave those kinds of rewards. It's very hard to give PvE ways of earning ulta-rare cards without making it possible for every retard with extra time on their hands to get a full playset of them and thereby making them worthless. (like how every n00b used to be able to get a playset of rares by finding t50 farms, given time) We need a way for skilled players to be able to obtain cards like that, but a way that also maintains their value. Right now, only a subset of the skilled players, the ones able to attend the 2 weekly tournaments and have the skill and luck necessary to win, are able to get them. If there was a PvE way of obtaining them, it would have to be significantly harder than Platinum Arena, and not something really easy like getting one every 5k score.
It's been mentioned elsewhere on the forum, but having a list of achievements to work towards would be fun as well, and there could possibly be in-game rewards for some of them as well. For example, there might be an achievement for defeating every false god at least once, and the reward might be one of those foil artworks or fancy playmat backgrounds. There are a lot of possibilities here, and the difficulty could range from super easy to virtually impossible, with rewards commensurate to the difficulty. Other possible rewards would be one-time electrum awards, ultra-rares (for the very hardest ones), oracle pets or predictions, and so on.
Another idea would be to have a 'bounty' system. Each day, there could be a particular false god or maybe halfblood that has a bounty placed on their head. (chosen at random) If you beat that fg or hb that day, you would win a small reward, like maybe a few hundred bonus electrum. You'd only be able to earn it once per day though. The fg/hb chosen could get some sort of special advantage, like an oracle pet, to make earning the bonus electrum more of a challenge, and if you fail to beat the fg/hb that game, you lose the opportunity to collect the bounty, even if you meet that same fg/hb later that day.
Another idea, similar to the bounty idea, would be to set it up so every false god match had a certain chance (like 1%) to be harder than normal somehow (extra hp, pet, more mark/draw, free permanents in play to start, etc) and have that match give a special reward if you manage to win it anyway. (like more electrum, or have all spins won be foil, etc)
I hope zanz sees this... I like my ideas :p
