So I'm at my friends' house, and in a couple of hours a large group of people will be rolling for some good old fashioned D&D. Meanwhile, we're devoid of internet, and therefore, very bored. It was there that, after several years, elements popped into my mind again for the first time.
Specifically, where and why elements as a game fails, and how I'd fix it. This thread is about the former part. And to understand what I mean by "where elements fails", I'm going to set this up with a wall of explanation. Sorry!
Before I even begin I'm going to say "what elements should balance around". Specifically, PVP2. A lot of people would disagree with me here, saying competitive play is based in the war. However, the war isn't part of the game, its an extra thing that was tacked on through the forums. Additionally, the success of the war was a bit of a happy accident. ScaredGirl wanted a forum wide event, but I was the one to suggest losing cards if you lost a match. When I did so, I had no idea the additional levels of prediction and strategies at the vault level it would add. I just thought to myself "in a real war soldiers die". The vault actually happens to FIX a lot of the problems I have with the game, but it's not part of the game. It's an extra bandaid we added by mistake.
(Also, trying to balance around the arena and the false gods is a bad idea. Giving your opponent extra advantages makes rushing them way harder, but in no way adds the difficulty in winning via lock-down. This warps the meta)
Here's what I'm talking about. You are about to walk into a PVP2 match. What deck do you bring? Or, more abstractly, what should the deck you bring try to do?
Well, in order to answer that, we have to know what answers are even available to us. Which brings me to my first point.
Threats, answers, and value
Three concepts everyone already intuitively gets, but maybe never thought about very hard.
A threat refers to any card that is winning your opponent the game. A phase shield is a threat, because it prevents your damage. However, if I'm playing an adrenaline+frogs deck, my adrenaline stop being threats once I run out of frogs.
An answer refers to any card that negates the threat. If phase shield is the threat, explosion is the answer. Answers can deal with several threats at once. If your opponent is playing grabbow, a black hole is a very good answer. By removing the quanta from the nova, you remove your opponents ability to play any of the cards in their hand, thus negating the threats.
Value refers to the swing in the number of turns both players take to win, the number of cards it negated, how many cards it required to make the play, the quanta cost of the cards negated by the play, and the quanta cost of the play. Hitting phase shield with explosion has a value of 3 quanta. Phase shield didn't get the chance to negate any damage. Explosion cost you one card, and phase shield cost your opponent one card. Therefore, the only value gained was the fact that explosion costs less than phase shield.
In the last example, pulverizer would be considered explosion on a stick, because pulverizer can repeatedly do everything explosion does.
An answer is considered going even if the value of the answer is 0, or close to 0. Explosion would "go even" with phase shield, because in the grand scheme of the game, 3 quanta is unlikely to matter. An answer beats a threat if the answer gives value, in addition to negating the threat. Steal "beats" phase shield, because in addition to gaining 2 quanta, you also gain the remaining turns of the phase shield. Pulvy also "beats" phase shield, because using pulvy to blow up a phase shield lets you keep the pulvy, gaining you value of 1 card.
Sometimes, a card can be both an answer and a threat. If you're using phase shield and your opponent plays explosion, you don't need to worry about how you'll deal with the explosion, it's gone. However, if you're using phase shield and your opponent drops pulverizer, you need to answer that pulverizer, otherwise you lose the value of 6 cards in your deck!
Using this, you have a rough way of evaluating how a game is going. If every decision you make goes even with your opponent, the game is pretty close. But as you start to squeeze extra value out of your cards, you'll start to see victory become more and more assured.
Unfortunately, you have no idea what threats or answers your opponent has. So how do you know what to pick?
Multifaceted > Consistent.
Chapuz made a deck called limitless speed, and it's pretty good! It hides behind phase shields until it draws it's combo, doing 200 damage with momentum and winning the game. Interestingly enough, he made two versions of the deck, a "fat" version and a "skinny" version. The fat version of the deck ran cards like sanctuary, lobotomizer, and purify, whereas the skinny version didn't.
The skinny version draws it's combo faster. There's less fluff to get through. Additionally, there are less dead cards. The skinny version never finds itself in a bind and draws a useless purify.
The fat version, however, has a far more diverse pool of answers. If you read his thread, he says that "if you get more than 4 poison on you, quit" versus one of the gods (serket, I believe). This is because the skinny version has no answer to poison damage, and once the poison damage gets high enough that the poison will kill you before you could hope to draw your combo, you're done. Thankfully, the fat version runs purify. Using phase shield to block scorpions, and purify to negate the value of the actual card "poison", the fat version can win games the skinny game can't, even if the fat version has a lower chance of drawing the combo it games it "should" win.
This tradeoff is what I mean when I say Multifaceted V. Consistent. If an aether deck runs psions and phase recluses, it will more consistently deal damage. However, if the aether deck drops the psions and instead uses lightning bolt, it can now use lightning bolt as an answer to threats. Deck 1 would die pretty hard if it's opponent dropped otyugh, because oty has 5 HP and none of the first deck's threats had more than 4 HP. But deck 2 would just bolt the Otyugh and move on!
But here's the twist. Deck 2 can also use it's lightning bolts for damage. Certainly, it seems unlikely that the lightning bolt will do as much damage as the psion would have during the course of the game, but it's still notable. Because of this, making the deck more multifaceted by adding lightning bolts didn't decrease the consistently very much. The multifaceted deck is better.
A more extreme version of this trade off is running Life Nymphs in a adrena-frogs deck, or just running the spell adrenaline. The spell adrenaline is cheaper, and you're guaranteed to get at least one hit with the adrenaline when you use the spell version. This makes it more consistent. However, running nymphs gives your deck 12 creatures, as opposed to 6. This means that running 6 lightning bolts isn't an effective answer anymore. It also gives you creatures with more HP, meaning running rain of fire isn't an answer any more. The lower consistency decreases the win rate a bit, but the smaller number of answers that beat your deck make it worth doing.
This is where balancing the game around PVP2 instead of the war is important. In a war, if you can figure out the deck your opponent is going to run before hand, you don't need to build a multifaceted deck. Why do you need to run answers for otyughs if your opponent isn't going to play otyugh? This is a large part of the reason I made this thread. Anyone theory-crafting the balance of the game based on the war doesn't realize how important a flexible deck is.
So wait. How am I supposed to pack an answer for everything?
There are five "strategies" in card games.
These strategies are:
Aggro: The purpose of this card is to deal damage to your opponent. You play the card and then forget about it, it does it's thing. An example of this would be a frog.
Protection: The purpose of this card is to "dodge" other cards your opponent plays. A great example of an "Protection" card is immortal. It's more expensive than other creatures with the same power and toughness, but in exchange, it cannot be targetted by you're opponents creature control, effectively answering them. Strangely, cards with momentum fit in this category.
Control: The purpose of this card is to blow up an opponents card. The purest example of a control card would read "destroy target card and negate it's effects".
Combo: The purpose of this card is to increase the value of another card. Adrenaline, for example, often applies a 4x multiplier to it's target's value.
Midrange: The purpose of this card is to do effect the entire board. This could either be Rain of Fire, or a card that says "every card your opponent casts costs 1 more".
These "strategies" do not refer to individual cards, nor do they refer to decks, they refer to why a card is a threat, if it's a threat. Some cards can potentially do more than one thing, but in actuality only get one of their uses in their deck. For instance, rage potion can EITHER be a control card OR a combo card depending on it's usage. If you plan on using rage potion to blow up your opponents stuff, you're using it for control. If you're using it to increase the damage of your own creatures, you're using it for combo.
This is important, because these strategies form a rock paper scissors.
Combo > Midrange > Aggro > Protection > Control > Combo.
Combo beating midrange isn't very intuitive. The goal of a midrange card is to slightly hinder lots of your opponents threats. Combo, as a strategy, aims to invest several cards into one gigantic threat. Rain of fire isn't an effective answer to adrenastaves, sorry. Additionally, because combo aims to get insane value out of a small collection of cards, this value can often supersede the protection of the midrange. No amount of midrange will save you from an OTK combo that ends with a 100 power chimera.
Midrange beating aggro makes sense. Aggro, as a strategy, spends one card to get one threat. Midrange uses one card to hurt every threat. If your midrange packs enough punch to kill the threat, then it kills EVERY threat, and spends 1 card to potentially kill 3 or 4 of your opponents cards. Rain of fire goes 4 for 1 if your opponent dropped 4 frogs.
Aggro beating protection makes sense as well. The extra strats on protection cards are expensive, and useless if they don't negate anything you do. Who cares if your opponents creature is immortal if you have nothing to target it? Why worry about momentum if you run no shields? Aggro simply outpaces protection cards and goes on it's merry way.
Protection beats control because control cards can't do anything to them. No amount of creature control will stop me if I use quintessence. No amount of permanent control will work if I enchant it.
Control beating combo doesn't happen very frequently in this game, although it is the case. Combo cards can often be USELESS if the entire combo isn't there. If your opponent is playing a deck with Fire's Nymph and Angels (unupped), it's got a two card combo on a stick to gain 5 damage. If you, however, spend one card to blow up the Nymph, you also cut the damage of the angel to 1 for the rest of the game. You went just under 1 for 2.
So when I say multifaceted > consistent, I mean that a deck that does 1 of these 5 things extremely well will lose to a deck that runs more than one of these 5 things. In the example of the psion + phase recluse deck versus the phase recluse + lightning bolt deck, the deck with psions can basically only go aggro, but the deck with lightning bolt can switch to control if it needs to. If your opponent is using cremation to rapidly play lava golems, it's worth your time to spend your quanta on the lightning bolts to blow them up. Your opponent is playing 3 cards to get one golem, if you spend 1 card to blow up that golem, then your opponent is going to quickly run out of cards, and you've still got phase spiders to spare!
So why then, don't people just stick all 5 of these strategies in a deck and call it a day?
Remember, it's better to run cards that can be used for two of these strategies than to just shove 4 cards with no synergy in a deck together. On top of that, these five types are very general, all of them have sub types.
There's both creature control and permanent control. And, if you start to get control on a stick, it starts to look a bit like midrange.
There's a large difference between OTK combos, and mana ramp combos. Mana ramp combos are an answer to midrange in the form of quanta control, but they aren't going to do very much against midrange in the form of sundials. Then there are some combos that just multiply the value of the card they target.
Aggro can either be physical damage or spell damage.
Midrange can be healing, or shielding, or board wipes, or quanta control.
With at least 4 kinds of midrange, 2 kinds of aggro, 3 kinds of combos, and 3 different kinds of control, it becomes nearly IMPOSSIBLE to fit everything in a deck. There's probably even more strategies I didn't think of! But you don't HAVE to do all of these things. Your deck just has to have an answer to any of these things that threaten you more than usual. If you're running a deck with frogs in it, your frogs get roflstomped by midrange. It'd probably be a good idea to think about running permanent control, and some way getting enough damage to win if they start using chain heals. If you're planning on giving your frog mitosis, you better have a plan to protect it, or kill creatures/permanents that threaten it. If you're going to fractal it, how do you survive someone using quanta lockdown?
By simply adding quintessence to your mitosis frog deck, suddenly it's beating control, which is something it's never done before. At the cost of 3 cards, you have an answer to another 1/5th of the game. And because of that, your multifaceted deck doesn't have to vary as much as you think it does.
Okay. So how does all of this reach the conclusion that elements as a game "fails" somewhere
Unfortunately, the circle of strategies is broken. Control cards to deal with spells are few and far between. Nightmare deals with fractal, black hole is a good answer to nova, but at the end of the day, it's not worth your time to build a deck that worries about spell-combos. In a PVP2 format, you shouldn't even bother. This also means that combos that rely on spells don't have an answer. A fractal deck uses both combo and aggro. Specifically, it uses fractal to get 8x the value out of it's aggro card. Even though it's a combo deck, you cannot beat it with control. You have to play midrange, specifically midrange that beats the creature the fractal targets, or you lose.
Additionally, control cards that deal with permanents are very scarce. There's explosion, steal, pulvy, and shard of focus, annnnd..... butterfly effect. Which, let's be honest hardly counts. This means that extremely powerful permanents, like phase shield, or sanctuary, or shard of freedom, are a lot stronger than just the effect they give. They get extra value in that you don't have to worry about your opponent's answers to them.
Also? Protection is very few and far between. Immortal, Phase Dragon, Quintessence, Aether Nymph, Shrieker, and Enchant Artifact, and the three indestructible shields are basically the only places you'll ever see it.
But hey, maybe those aren't actually problems. Maybe that's just how elements is. It doesn't have to be like every other card game.
However, part of what makes elements so great, and so different from every other card game, is how widely spread cards are. There are 12 different elements! Most of them don't have access to a lot of the strategies I listed above. Life has no control of any kind. If you're rocking creature control on a stick, life is in real trouble. But the game was never designed around monos, it was designed around duos. You have to pick two elements that compliment each other enough that you aren't running an extremely inconsistent deck, but that are different enough that you've got a multifacted deck, with answers to a wide array of threats.
Unfortunately, there are at least two examples that break this rule:
1) Rainbow
2) Aether
Rainbow gives you access to every element, and therefore, it's conceivable to gain access to every single one of those strategies I listed above. Decks of this type litter the history of elements. Cards that can be used in multiple ways are generally more expensive to balance their higher flexibility. But when you use rainbows, you can instead run a wide array of very cheap 1 dimensional cards, that are very good at what they do, and with enough stalling and draw power, you'll get them all. Or hey, why not use the ability to use all 12 elements to run such a wide array of threats it's impossible to kill them all before you lose? Both of these decks crushed false gods.
The trade off of going rainbow, as any elements player will tell you, is that it's quanta base is weaker, making it slower, and denying it access to anything on a stick. If you keep playing the same answer enough times, eventually it'll stop the rainbow. Additionally, if you run any sort of quanta disruption, the rainbow deck is dead in the water, and if your deck is fast enough, you can beat the rainbow deck before it gets off the ground.
However, these problems aren't big enough problems. Grabbows are fast enough to account for the speed problem. Because there isn't any spell control, you can use nova as a "combo" to break through quanta lock down, and unload your very cheap hand. The only real to deal with a rainbow deck is to deal with the cards it plays after it gets them out, and then play that answer several times until it sticks. But rainbow has access to every card? How are you supposed to pick an answer to that? And then run lots of copies of it?!
Aether also breaks this rule, because mono-Aether has access to everything. Lobotomizer + phase shield stops 100% of physical damage. Psion is cheap enough and durable enough to beat both prison and board wipes, and it's spell damage means it beats every shield but two. There's only one card in the game that answers fractal, so you can get 8x the value of psion, already a very high value card, and healing doens't look like a very effective solution either. Aether also gets lightning as creature control, for those nasty combos that are good enough lobo doesn't fit the bill.
Aether only loses to spells (which everything loses to, so who cares), and permanents. Throw in fire mark. If you can fit some deflags, some phase shields, psions, and then 1 or 2 a piece of both lobo and fractal, the only thing you're missing is... answers to poison and prison. There's only 1 answer in the game a piece to both of those. Run lots of pillars and outpace the poison, GG. You can even lobo your own psions if they drop reflective shields.
With shard of freedom, it's starting to look like Air doesn't have many threats it can't answer either.
So this is what I mean by Elements "failing" in some regards. whereas aether and rainbow get effortless access to everything they could ever ask for, balanced elements are struggling to pick the right duos to be even close to that flexible, and then some elements just don't have anything.
There are lots of problems I have with the game. I think the strength of rares and upgrades, and the difficulty there is to acquire them, really stifles the flow of new players. But even if that were fixed, Zanz needs to spread the love a bit. Until then? Without a vault to limit them, the vast majority of decks you fight in PVP are going to be rainbow, mono aether, and decks that win based off spells. Go play the arena, pay attention, you'll notice how many there are. And, more importantly, which ones beat you.
Some famous martial artist, I believe it was Jet Li, said "in the mind of the novice, the possibilities are infinite, but in the eyes of the master, the possibilities are few". I'm starting to think perhaps, too few. And that just makes the game not fun.
At least not for me.
