I think it's a good thing that we have one shield that is resistant to permanent destruction. It makes the game more interesting and permanent removal less "must-have".
We have two shields that are resistant to permanent desruction: Jade Shield and Mirror Shield.
I'm pretty sure you are well aware that those two shields only block a fraction of damage, so it's a totally different thing.
Bone Wall is a shield of choice for decks that have bunch of creatures and/or creature control, something the Element of death does pretty well.
I have to assume because of this statement that you've never designed a game. Balance is not that easy, not by a long shot. I've only ever had one game sold, but I've been on the design team for a few others, and I've seen my fair share of colossal game-balance screwups. There are some concepts that are simply unbalancable.
How on earth would making Bone Walls stackable be "unbalancable"? That's what we are talking about there so lets not make it about something else. While gaming balance is
very important and difficult process in off-line games, regular CCG's, etc., it's different in this game because in this game we could potentially have updates every day.
Buffing a card, any card, won't instantly kill the game and set the servers on fire. If a card is buffed and it becomes too powerful, all you need to do is nerf it a little bit new week or next day. It's not a big deal.
This kind of balancing is done in Guild Wars and it's a perfect system. Not only are you constantly moving towards a perfect balance, also metagame changes as cards do, keeping it interesting for the players. We don't have to be
afraid of change because we can at any point change it again, or even go back to what it was before.
As a side note, you're talking about an imagingary world where magical sundials stop time for fantastic creatures but not objects (weapons still attack) or humans (players still draw and cast), and you want to talk about what "makes sense"? That just lolful.
This is an argument that I've heard many many times.
Lets take Lords of the Rings for example. It has goblins, trolls (not forum) and magic, so you could say that it "doesn't make sense". But imagine the movie if it didn't have any gravity. Everyone were flying around the Middle Earth. You think the audience or readers would accept that?
This is what I mean by "making sense". There are some things that do not "make sense" that are totally acceptable because this is fantasy genre. But that does not mean you can go crazy and do anything you come up with and call it fantasy. People won't accept it because it doesn't "make sense".
Also, we can't really assume that what makes sense to you, makes sense to me. I guess I'm the only one that hasn't played a bone wall on top of my existing bone wall because it made sense to me that the shield I was getting ready to play was going to replace the shield I had. And if you look at the poll results so far most of the pairs of questions are split nearly 50-50.
Now
that is a good point. Although if we talk about this Bone Wall situation, I think most people who think they shouldn't be stackable, are mainly worried about game balance, not how they think it should be. And like I said earlier, game balance is easy to fix with trial and error.