I voted this one: SoSac should require any creature to be sacrificed in order to trigger.
With that change, I think shard of sacrifice would be balanced. It would still be a strong card, but you couldn't just put it in anything you wanted anymore, which is the main problem with it. I don't think the creature needs to be a death creature for balance, but maybe if it was it would confer some minor benefit, like losing a few less hp, maybe 4 or even 8, making it like the original SoSa values.
Making it last longer for a death creature would just create new problems :p You could also base the hp loss on the hp of the sacrificed creature, but that might cause balance issues with things like basilisk blood/auburn nymph giving a creature bazillions of hp and then saccing it for huge gains.
Woo for voting for my suggestion
Ok, on a balance note, I have a couple viewpoints, sosac is not Completely OP anymore, just slightly, also, I'm talking about this in an upped sense, cuz cheesy, Sosac is pretty much trash unupped. Takes like half your full hp in unupped play, where many opponents are going to have slow damage. My argument for all shards is that they need to be slightly spashable, but should give a substantial boost to a certain element, hence why I love sofree, sose, and sow, yet hate Sofo.
Sacrificing ties in with deaths "death effects", and on a whole slightly nerfs it. Hell, it doesn't even ruin poisondials, switch to death mark and run RoL's, slight nerf, but still playable. In the upgraded atmosphere, it is too easy to stall a tiny bit for your opponent to get damage, then just annihalate them. Hell, Dragon beat me in a CL match when I was using silence is golden (granted, horrible draws with only 1 SN until last turn). He had queens sacrifice, which is a deck that should definitely not benefit from sosac, (Yes, lets sacrifice your quanta generators, and use expensive abilities, then lets just go ahead and drain all your quanta). I could have won, but he sosac'd 2 turns (maybe 1) before he won. This ensured that I couldn't play any creatures or heal him up, essentially giving him the win. Its basically acted as a free, 2 turn silence, but is infintely times more versatile. I feel like a deck like queens sacrifice, or toast, or (apparently some people have speedbows with sosac?) shouldn't have a right to it that easily. Sosac needs to help death more, and draining all quanta really doesn't cut it. You lose about a turn, but essentially gain 2 where your invincible, most of the time 3 turns. This is not exactly fitting.
Making it so you need to sacrifice a creature would make it a 2 card combo, and align with death effects. I'm not quite for having to sacrifice a death creature, as I don't think it needs that much of a nerf. If you want to include 0 cost cards, go ahead, you now have 12 cards in your deck to mess up the mulligan. (I take it back, maybe this will nerf Pdials, but good riddance, PITA having to make every arena deck counter it) We can allready see this in PDials. I run a cremation rush with no towers, it is blazingly fast when it works, but its techincally only half as stable as a deck based on towers. Sosac needs this little nerf so it takes time to set it up. Sosac is definitely a stalling card, no doubt about it, so lets not let it be able to be put into rushes? If you spend the time to amass creatures with graveyard, you can use sosac. If you take the time to get pairs of photons and sosac, you can use it, I have no issue with this. I have an issue when you can put this "death" stall card into a rushing deck. Many of sosac's counters happen to be in stalls (and yes, there is another thread that supports this) Holy light (XD who am I kidding, nobody uses this to counter sosac) is a light card, and nobody rushes with light (correct me if I'm wrong). Purify is usable early game, as well as cremation, but as soon as an immorush loses its initial burst damage, it loses a lot of its strength. AM and dials are both used in stalls.
My problem is that sosac needs to lose a bit of its versatility, obviously the draining all quanta was meant to do this, but it's really not that much of a setback, as you can see from a multitude of decks. Basically, if you have a deck that needs defense, theres a pretty good chance sosac won't completely screw it, and it will give you enough time to finish your strategy.
That was my semi-rant and opinions, make sure to call me out on anything and I'll clarify/defend it (and hopefully persuade you).
EDIT: clarification and grammar stuff.
