Well, going through the interview, here are my thoughts:
Jeff: I played Elements for about a year. I started in 2010 and quit sometime in middle 2011
This timeframe is extremely unlikely. The interview does not mention shards, pendulums, or the arena. It also does not mention nymphs, whose ultra-rarity should have come up as an interview topic, one way or another. I can only conclude that either Jeff is remembering incorrectly or he overlooked some of the most important features of the metagame, namely shards and pendulums.
The game was really easy to learn
He is correct here. You can learn how to play the game in under half an hour. The simplicity of Elements is both a strong and a weak point. It allows new players to enter quickly with a shallow learning curve, but it also means there is a certain lack of complexity; for example, no actions can be taken in the opponent's turn. (another point that was not raised at all in the interview, either as comment or criticism)
Weapon cards. I mean, they were ridiculously overpowered, but they were also really fun to use.
This raises several flags in my mind. Firstly, the weapons actually are not overpowered, compared to many other cards that would have existed at the time, such as nova. Also the fact that he mentions weapons are overpowered, but makes no mention of shards, some of which really are overpowered (such as the old shard of gratitude at the time he claims to have played), indicates that the timeframe above is wrong. Thirdly, the comment about enjoying the use of what Jeff perceives to be overpowered cards suggests in my mind a bit of a n00bish attitude towards gaming in general, despite his year of playing Elements. (which is, unfortunately, an ad hominem argument, but quite likely still true)
weapon cards often had repeatable effects that could be used each turn, and there weren’t really many answers for them. Like, some colors couldn’t even deal with weapon cards, and that alone made them unviable
Some elements do indeed have trouble dealing with weapons, and permanents in general. This alone doesn't make invididual elements unviable, but it does contribute to the weakness of elements like Life.
For example, answers, which are like counterspells in Magic, are way too cheap for what they do. Not only that, but they’re also way too specific in what they counter so there doesn’t seem to be a lot of cleverness in the ways they can be used. Some were even specific to certain colors, so those colors could deal with threats better than others.
This is largely untrue. Jeff, who mentions playing Magic here, doesn't seem to realize that cards like Rewind, Thunderbolt, Explosion, or Steal have direct analogues in M:TG, and while I haven't done the math, I'd wager that if you quantitatively worked it out, they'd have comparable casting costs. He apparently hasn't ever seen staple M:TG cards like Swords to Plowshares or Mana Drain or Force of Will or Lightning Bolt or any number of cheap answers that are more overpowered than any removal in Elements, none of which he seems to be thinking about. As for cleverness in using the removal, it's not really that much different than a game like Magic, and apparently he's never used Butterfly Effect to lobotomize a creature, or killed something with liquid shadow or overdrive, or taken down flying titans with a fallen elf. He also doesn't seem to realize that there are indirect counters to things; Discord or Nightmare will screw up Fractal, Rewind will screw up Animate Weapon, Silence will screw up Miracle, and so on. The one point he is correct about here is that some elements are better able to deal with threats than others, giving them inherent weaknesses. (though ideally this will change as the game grows) Fire and Darkness, for example, have removal for both creatures and permanents. (so does entropy, but BE is pretty weak) Life and Light, as two more examples, each have exactly one card capable of killing creatures, thorn carapace and holy light, respectively.
Another thing that really bothered me was the number of untargetable creatures. I just find that really unfun.
Immortal and Phase Dragon are the only untargetable creatures. The only ways to grant immortality to a creature are anubis, quintessence, and turquoise nymph. There are also counters to immortal creatures, such as fire shield and thorn carapace. Again, Jeff seems to ignore the more numerous shrouded creatures in M:TG when making his comparative argument, some of which are stronger than anything currently found in Elements. (for those here who played Magic, they will surely remember the reign of Morphling, a.k.a. 'Superman')
Jeff: That’s another problem – there is no removal, at least none that would adequately deal with the main threats you would face. For the most part, if you wanted to get rid of a creature, you had to wait until you drew some sort of removal that would get rid of the creature, or pretty much not do anything at all.
Me: That, to me, seems like a pretty lame way to handle creatures.
Jeff: Yeah, I would agree.
So... the only way to remove a creature is to draw removal? Okay... and that is different from every single other card game how exactly? It also completely contradicts his earlier point
For example, answers, which are like counterspells in Magic, are way too cheap for what they do
where he claims that Elements' answers are undercosted and overpowered; here, he reverses his stance by saying that removal is completely inadequate, even though he just said that it's overpowered. Which one is it, then, Jeff? Overpowered, like you said the first time, or underpowered, like you said the second time?
Well the game is all about card advantage. There’s this card called Electrum Hourglass that gave you an extra card each turn. Pretty much you tried to get as many of those on the field as you could before your opponent, or at least have more than your opponent (i.e. steal from your opponent). Basically once a player got more Hourglasses, you could pretty much tell who was going to win from there.
Jeff once more selectively picks his comparisons to Magic. Apparently he's never heard of Ancestral Recall or Necropotence. He is right that Elements (and every other CCG in existence) is about card advantage at its core, but that's nothing unusual. He also ignores indirect card advantage from cards like Owl's Eye, Firestorm, Steal, Otyugh, or a host of others, all of which can compete toe to toe with the hourglass. He is right that the hourglass is a powerful card, and I would argue that it is one of the strongest cards in the game, and certainly Time's strongest card, but it's not an automatic win.
Oh, and about the pillars. Early on it’s all about getting lucky and drawing more pillars than your opponent. Since you can play as many pillars as you have each turn, then you pretty much lost if your opponent had way more than you did. I feel this was honestly bad for the game because it made the early game all about luck. Magic didn’t have this problem because you could only play one land per turn, so this seemed like a step backwards.
Another poor comparison. Apparently, when Jeff plays Magic, both players always get exactly the same number of lands in their opening hands, or he would not have made this comment, because it is incorrect in any other context. (I'll point to the famous M:TG match between Jon Finkel and Richard Garfield, in which Jon wtfpwned Richard because Richard had one land in his opening hand as a simple example, while Jon had an adequate number) He also ignores the opposite problem, where a player draws too many pillars and not enough threats/removal, and loses that way instead. And Jeff has never seen cards like Duress, Dark Ritual, Force of Will, Black Lotus, Ancestral Recall, Sol Ring, or a host of other devastating turn 1 cards if he thinks Magic doesn't have exactly the same issue.
Me: Okay so it’s all about getting an advantage early on.
Jeff: Yeah like I said, you pretty much could tell who was going to win based on who had more advantage, or who got luckier, in the early game
I can do the same thing in Magic after about turn 4. Big deal if you can do it in Elements, too.
Me: What would you say the typical meta was right before you left?
Jeff: The meta… well there was only really two types of decks viable. You had to play either rainbow or mono decks, and you couldn’t play any sort of deck that had a mix of two or three colors. I think they’ve made some changes since I left that makes those kinds of decks a bit more viable, but the problem was in the pillars. Like, your pillars either gave you one color or random colors. There wasn’t any sort of pillar that gave you a mix of two colors
This was true before pendulums existed. Unfortunately for Jeff's timeline, pendulums were added to the game sometime before March 2011. (the date I personally started Elements, and pendulums, along with nymphs and some shards, already existed by then, and Jeff claims to have still been playing at this point) The 'changes since [he] left' most likely refers to pendulums, and that blows his timeline out of the water. He is correct in that trios/quartets/quintets are pretty much impossible to make competitively at this time (discounting duos that have something like animate weapon in them to make them ostentibly trios, but duos in fact) but duos can be made competitively, and even at the time Jeff was playing (the time he really was playing, not the time he says he did) you could have made a competitive duo by simple virtue of the fact that you could have used pillars of one element and your mark for a second element.
