One of the core concepts in CCG deckbuilding is the concept of the "mana curve", or in more generic terms, the setting up of a deck in a manner that maximally utilizes your existing resources every turn. In 1996, Paul Sligh took a M:tG tournament by surprise with a simple-looking mono-Red deck using creatures that weren't necessarily the most impressive or efficient, but rather were arranged in a spread that was mathematically designed to use every point of mana available to the deck every turn, eliminating waste.
Since that tournament, every CCG that relies on anything akin to M:tG's mana has had it's imitators, and the idea of the mana curve has buried itself deep in the CCG players' collective subconscious. As you've probably guessed, this concept has no place in Elements whatsoever.
The reason why is pretty simple: in Elements, you don't 'lose' any unspent quanta at the end of each turn. That means that spending 5 quanta on turn 1 means not spending 10 quanta on turn 2. The question in Elements is not how to optimize your quanta usage per turn, but how to optimize it per investment. Let me explain.
It took me a long time when I first started playing and stumbled across mono-Aether (before I found the boards and learned what that meant) to realize that playing an Immortal now is stupid if you can wait 2 turns and play a Phase Dragon. I was literally making myself lose more by wasting quanta on an investment that wasn't going to return as much damage as quickly as my other investment option. I think, unfortunately, that the Immortal/Phase Dragon is the only really clear-cut example, however, because they're the only creatures that can basically ignore your opponent's potential interference.
If there were no opponent interference in Elements, i.e. if it were just a race to 100 points of damage, just about the only creatures that would get played are growth-based creatures and Dragons. That's because spending 3 quanta on an Elite Cockatrice is stupid when you could wait 4 turns and spend 12 Quanta on an Emerald Dragon. Over the next 3 turns, the Dragon's damage output would catch up with and overtake the Cockatrice's easily.
But there is interference from the opponent, and that means that Dragons are risky -- putting 12 Quanta into any one thing is risky, because the opponent can usually find a way to get rid of any one thing. The simple fact is, with 100 HP between you and a loss, in Elements, (unless you're playing a False God) you've got time to gain control if you're careful, no matter how blitzkrieg-y your opponent gets. That means that even you fast-attack players have to carefully examine how much of your quanta your opponent can take away with a single card.
For example: Fire decks. Fire seems like the all-around element, with permanent destruction, creature removal, direct damage, and massively-powerful attackers. But it's creatures tend toward the pricey side, and they're all remarkably easy for your opponent to remove from the game, making Fire a risky quanta investment. Most Fire player's games are lost when the opponent manages to (oddly enough) Firestorm at the right moment, or get out a Protected Eagle's Eye or Immaterial Otyugh. Each Fire creature seems hugely powerful, but the fragility makes each Fire's investment of quanta into a high-risk portfolio.
On the other hand, investing in, say, non-Graboid Earth creatures has the opposite problem. Unless your name is "Seism", you're just not going to pump out Golems and Antlions and Stone Dragons fast enough to keep up with your opponent's counterattack, no matter how reliable of an investment they are.
Essentially, in Elements, there is no "mana curve", but there is something similar -- the "risk curve". How much of your Quanta are you willing to invest in high-risk, high-reward cards like Dragons versus low-risk, low-reward cards like Blue Crawlers? Many of the popular PVP and t50 farming decks right now exemplify this "risk curve" by utilizing cards that are outliers on the risk/reward bell curve like Physalia (sure, it's easy to remove, but there's almost no investment, and since no one carries Purify, the reward grows with every passing turn) and Quintessence (removes almost all risk from a potentially high-risk creature, and requires so little investment that it's almost a no-brainer). There is no "Sligh" deck capable of using underpowered creatures to surprising effect in Elements -- your job as a deckbuilder, then, is limited to identifying those hard-to-find low-risk/high reward cards and card combinations and exploiting them as best you can.
