Very good post. I agree with most of the things you say.
1. The way you keep people playing now is through "the grind". A CCG shouldn't need this. The draw of a CCG should always be deck construction. I understand wanting to limit players choice of cards some way, but having people grind for it is not a good way, simply because it's really boring. I would suggest giving people a more fun way of winning rare and upgraded cards, based around deck construction. Introduce "challenges", where a player faces 1 or more pre-constructed AI decks after one another. The challenge is in building a deck that can take on all the decks in the challenge. For example, you might have a "Beginners Challenge" where you face 3 fairly easy AI decks. Defeating all three in a row with the same deck nets you a card. Another challenge could be "Venomous Challenge", where you meet 3 different decks using poison as their main damage. The player has to take this into account, and build a deck that can handle this. The harder challenges would be more challenging. Can you construct a deck that can reliably beat Seism, Miracle and Morte? Each challenge would have different cards as rewards, forcing players to try to defeat all of them if they want access to everything. If you want to limit player growth even more, you can set a limit to the number of cards a player can earn per day. You could also offer different rewards to players completing a challenge in an exceptional way, winning in under 10 turns or with full health or whatever.
Yeah, I hate grind with a passion. When MMO's became popular, players were introduced to the concept of grind. MMO's needed some kind of timesink and because developers didn't have the resources to give them thousands of hours of quests, there had to be grind.
Unfortunately today many developers think there HAS TO BE grind. Why do we need grind? Nobody likes it so why do we have it? Grind is an old PvE system that is not relevant today.
That's why I love MMO's like Guild Wars -
THERE IS NO GRIND. Actually I think Elements should use the EXACT same method that Guild Wars uses.
In Guild Wars..
1. You start the game with a bunch of basic skills.
2. When you win PvP battles, you get points (faction)
3. With these points you can unlock new skills
4. With enough wins, you will unlock new areas and new PvP content (4vs4, 8vs8, 12vs12..)
So basically the more you play, the more skills you get, and the more skills you have, the more combinations you can build (you can only have 8 skills in your skillbar).
This is what Elements should do. Just give us tons of cards and try to balance them. With many different cards available, we can then start to build all kinds of different decks. When one card turns out to be overpowered, you just make small changes to it, like lower the cost to play etc. This will CHANGE the metagame and players can start building new kinds of decks. This keeps things fresh and we slowly go towards PERFECT card balance.
I like this idea of Challenges you have. It's basically the same think I talk about here
http://elementstheforum.smfforfree3.com/index.php/topic,444.0.html (
http://elementstheforum.smfforfree3.com/index.php/topic,444.0.html) only I'm talking about Quests.
Having these Challenges/Quests would be perfect. Like you said first there would be these "Beginner Challenges" where you have to win 3 matches in a row to win some basic cards. Then Later there would be "Hero/Legend Challenges" where you have to win 5 in a row to win a powerful (but expensive to use) Hero/Legend card.
I disagree on limiting the number of cards you can win in a day. I don't think games should have restrictions like that. If the guy wants to dump his girlfriend and play 14 hours a day, that's his choice. To keep the game interesting for all the "pro-gamers" all you need to do is make the endgame REALLY difficult and build a functioning PvP system.
2. Keep a baseline for card balance. I see the attraction in having an upgrade system, and some of the upgraded cards add a lot of new strategies, but having 2 different levels of card balance is a huge headache. Rework the upgraded cards to have the same power as regular cards, only give different strategies. Elite Phase dragons can be more powerful than regular ones, but they should also cost more. Elite fireflies can give another color of quantum, but they should have the same power as a regular one. This gives plenty of new strategies, but makes the game much easier to balance. Upgraded pillars could be given unique effects based on the element they belong to. Time's could cost one quantum to play, but you can sacrifice them to draw a card, and so on.
Best part of Guild Wars is that:
NO SKILL IS "BETTER" THAN ANOTHER. This is something Elements should have also.
In GW there is a very good balance between skills. If a skill is not so powerful, it's cheap to use. If the skill is powerful, it's expensive to use. This is the basic idea of balancing skills (or cards).
However in Elements some cards are clearly better than others. For example Shard of Divinity is MUCH better than Heal. There are no possible situations where Heal would be better, Shard is ALWAYS better. Also most upgraded cards are much better than non-upgraded ones. Either they are less expensive and do the same thing, or they cost the same but the effect is stronger. This limits deck building because you don't have to think about which card to take, you just take the better one.
