I first want to start off before I begin my rant by saying I love Elements, if I didn't I wouldn't waste my time making posts about it.
Having said that, I have noticed a huge problem in the design of the game. It wouldn't be that hard to fix, but right now it's affecting it in a very negative way.
The problem in short: Extra Draw cards - which include the Sundial and the Electrum Hourglass.
Now this may not seem like a very big deal at first glance, but it really is. By having only one element that gets the ability to perform extra draws, you are basically forcing the player to include this element in their deck. As soon as one player gets an extra draw card, they suddenly have a 2x advantage over their opponent, as they are getting twice as many cards per turn. Obviously, the more draws you get, the higher this advantage goes up.
The ONLY way to defeat the time or rainbow deck is to play one of the two colors which can destroy permanents with spells: Fire or Dark, since they can easily remove the extra draw cards from the game, and nullify that advantage. However, every other mono color deck is royally screwed, because as soon as the game becomes a 2x draw for his opponent, it's pretty much over.
This is why the major Top 50 decks are either rainbow decks, heavily reliant on extra draw cards, or Fire Rush decks, which directly counter the permanents which allow the user to do this. All of the rest of the decks are really underpowered compared to this.
If you don't believe me go check it out! I've spent the last 3 hours just running through as many Top 50 matches as I could. If the opponent's Mark was Entropy or Time, I just cancelled the match, since they would obviously be using extra draw cards. The only other 2 types of decks you saw were poison and fire. Poison is a gimmick deck, based more on luck than anything, and fire decks like I said before, directly counter the extra draw deck, but even then they usually lose.
Here's an important point: If a player could design a deck that could beat an opponent who got 2 draws per turn (naturally), had a 90 card deck full of only elites, and got 3 of his mark per turn (instead of the normal 1), do you think this deck would be very balanced? Of course it wouldn't, it would be ridiculous. Welcome to False Gods and the deck I just mentioned. False Gods should be nearly impossible to beat, it's not a coincidence that the deck that does it consistently is chocked full of extra draw cards.
If you don't agree with me I hope you have a really good argument. Like I said, go check the Top 50 decks and 75% of the decks you will see are extra draw, the other 25% being mass poison or fire rush. Should the game really be this narrowly designed? I feel like the user should have the ability to build a mono color deck out of any color and be at least somewhat successful. Time cards should NOT have to be included in their decks to win consistently. (By the way, an easy way to win Top 50 consistently as I inadvertently discovered, is to just cancel every game against an Entropy or Time Mark player and keep going until you hit any other type of Mark. Use your False God farming deck and gg, free wins.)
Suggestions: Reduce Sundial Duration to 1 turn. It would still be an awesome card.
Electrum Hourglass needs to cost a LOT more to bring out and a lot more to use its extra draw effect. 1 time quantum per draw is unacceptable.
