Why the game has to be so unrewarding?

[Toge111]

If you have good deck and win, you get measly amount of money. Something like 15 electrum. Whoopie, only 100 wins to go for upgrade. Except you have to be a winner, because if you lose, you also lose the money you won earlier. If you play 20 games and win half of them, you've gained nothing. There's nothing as frustrating to me as non-progress. If you play an RPG and gain experience points, you get to keep those experience points. Every level makes you stronger. At the end of the day you feel like you've accomplished something.

Just get rid of those punitive playing costs. It's already bad enough fate to be so poor as to have no upgraded cards.

[Fallower]

LOL!
Go farm false gods?
They give insane amounts of cash for the cost needed to fight em.

[Asator]

It matters, how much HP you have left at the end of the games you win.

If you have full health, you gain EM (elemental mastery) and you receive much more cash. You simply have to grind the lower Levels, untill you can afford stronger cards to build a better deck. Just watch the decks that are posted here in this Forum.

Playing costs are fine the way they are in my opinion

[Daytripper]

Well, the slot machine and the electrums give the game a bit of a ''gambling'' theme. What you win is not XP by the way, just ''gold.'' The amount of electrums does not help you in the game, only buying a 'weapon'' (card) does. Did you ever play any games in which even using a weapon cost you your gold, while you use the same gold to buy weapons?

I know it takes long, I was ready to quit myself... But in the end it is still fun to just play and try, after you'ven taken a break of a week.

You should not be losing half of the time. A fast deck can win in 2 minutes also. Even if you lose a few, 10 wins should not take you over 26 minutes. The cards won make up for any losses... If you are ready to face t50 and win just half, a rare can still be worth 100 electrums. So a quick t50 session goes a long way to those 1500 electrums. The beginning is hard... but once you upped 10 or 15 cards it gets easier. Just use the fire rush/life rush/graboid rush with shriekers/defence cards and start to upgrade it. You can also use a FG slayer deck off the forums right away, though I bought one and it is very slow.

[Toge111]

LOL!
Go farm false gods?
They give insane amounts of cash for the cost needed to fight em.

- In Soviet Russia the false gods farm YOU.

[Fallower]

:O:O:O:O:O
Halp!!!

(I thought he was gonna troll me xD)

But seriously, false god farming is super fast! Some unupped decks are here:
http://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php/topic,11024.0.html

[Toge111]

The beginning is hard... but once you upped 10 or 15 cards it gets easier.

- It's all about achieving that critical mass. RoL + Hope deck might be good, but un-upgraded photon doesn't even work in it. Upgrading 6 photons costs over nine thousand! Then again those upped cards don't help you when grinding level 3, because there's different decks for everything.

[Higurashi]

I wouldn't mind getting rid of the loss penalty when you're starting out, since it's only a real bother when you're poor. Once fully upped, you lose too seldom for it to matter.
Now, your example of playing 20 games and winning half means you will have gained, since the cost is two thirds of the average possible gain (meaning you win at 50 health, 15 electrum for Elders). With any half-decent deck though, you'll win most games and with a lot of HP left. Very few games are won with 1 HP left. Also, you get spins.

[pwnzor99]

The beginning is hard... but once you upped 10 or 15 cards it gets easier.

- It's all about achieving that critical mass. RoL + Hope deck might be good, but un-upgraded photon doesn't even work in it. Upgrading 6 photons costs over nine thousand! Then again those upped cards don't help you when grinding level 3, because there's different decks for everything.

For unupped RoL/Hope, one card... Luciferin.

[7_Deadly_Sins]

The beginning is hard... but once you upped 10 or 15 cards it gets easier.

- It's all about achieving that critical mass. RoL + Hope deck might be good, but un-upgraded photon doesn't even work in it. Upgrading 6 photons costs over nine thousand! Then again those upped cards don't help you when grinding level 3, because there's different decks for everything.

For unupped RoL/Hope, one card... Luciferin.

Does that acually work like a normal RoL deck?

[Sir Valimont]

If you have good deck and win, you get measly amount of money. Something like 15 electrum. Whoopie, only 100 wins to go for upgrade. Except you have to be a winner, because if you lose, you also lose the money you won earlier. If you play 20 games and win half of them, you've gained nothing. There's nothing as frustrating to me as non-progress. If you play an RPG and gain experience points, you get to keep those experience points. Every level makes you stronger. At the end of the day you feel like you've accomplished something.

Just get rid of those punitive playing costs. It's already bad enough fate to be so poor as to have no upgraded cards.

I have found in my long gaming experience that games with smaller proportional rewards for playing time are actually more rewarding overall (not to play on words). The paradigm shift in the video game industry towards group-play is in part thanks to the online medium but is largely a result of a realization of what I've said: People are more loyal to a game, and in the long run enjoy a game more when it is difficult to advance. And it's not hard to understand why: simply put, when you spend an entire week playing for a small in-game achievement, then you are less likely to walk away from the game at the end of that week, since you'd be throwing away "all of that work." If anything, the gradual reward system is therefore much more addictive than a quick-high system you might get otherwise; and the euphemism is intentional here. Drugs that give smaller-dose highs on average tend to be MORE addictive than harder drugs. Counter-intuitive but true.

[Higurashi]

Nope, it's really weak. The main weakness of RoL/Hope is bad draws, and having to keep a Luci in hand (and add several to the already tight deck) before Fractal only makes it worse, especially when you don't have any healing and mass-CC crushes you even worse. A variation with Light Nymph and Dragons work, but that one uses RoL's.