You're given either 2, 3, 4, or 5 elements. Proposal:
2 elements: Choose 1 from
and one from
(the strength are arbitrarily decided by me atm, can easily be changed)
3 elements: Choose 1 from
, one from
, one from
(again, quickly and arbitrarily decided)
4 elements: Choose 1 from
, one from
, one from
, and one from
5 elements: Choose 1 from
, one from
, one from
, one from
, one from
This allows for significantly less situations where nothing really useful can be done. Same system applies to marks.
Fire: The upgraded card benefit was not really useful early on, but it became more useful late-event. The reason behind this is water and earth being significantly more powerful from 0 -> 1 (or 1 -> 2) than 2 -> 3 than fire was. Could definitely be upped to 5-6 card tiers.
Air: This was probably the strongest element early-event, but got weaker as it progressed. Round 1 appeared to have a lot of Air victories, which is easily explained by the coin-toss factor and less cards (36 vs. 40 is non-trivial) being more powerful than any other 1st-tier element. However, later on the advantage seemed to become less significant as more decks became available due to water/earth levels generally increasing.
There really should be more meaning to what element you sign up with. Signing up with an element makes it far more difficult to gain levels in that element than it is for anybody else, which rather devalues the concept as it is helpful to sign up with a relatively weaker element (i.e. earth, which also has the perk of a big difference between tier 0 and 1) late-event.