Vault issues have been discussed on several different places, and I didnt know where to put it, so here it is.
Let me start by problems with current Vault (as I see them).
1) Not all elements are equally affected by Vault rules. Elements that are strong in their mono form, and use other elements just as addition to tune their strategy, are not as affected by losing games like elements that rely on cards from other elements to work well.
2) Limit of a single card count in the Vault is also affecting different elements differently.
Some cards you NEED to take 5-6 of in your deck to make them worth carrying, and losing them destroys whole deck strategy (say Poison, Cremation etc), while with spells like Protect Artifact, Steal etc, you can carry 2-3 of those, lose them and still have your deck strategy.
Same goes with creatures of some elements.
and
have plenty of creatures to carry and lose. Losing creatures for elements like
is devastating.
There are also spells like Fractal. If you're not
, you can carry 6 of those. Chances are, you want something like 4 of those in your deck. Losing that match loses Fractal strategy for your future rounds.
You can agree or disagree with examples I provided here, but hopefully you'll understand the point I'm trying to make.
3) Discarding and Salvaging process requires 5:1 ratio to break even. Even if you change the ratio to say 3:3, you'll be salvaging cards that are worth less to you, than those you have to discard. So, even if a team manages to get break even ratio, it is still losing its deckbuilding options.
Now, all those are problems mostly because of huge loss in cards after a match. When you factor in that lots of matches were decided by a pure guessing game or simply coin toss, discarding hurts even more. Which brings me to:
4) Fun factor - it is really not fun to have to make suicide decks, or throw the match before it even starts. Throwing matches is not cool, and also counter productive to this competition that should say which element is the best (or its players, whatever).
Now, this is getting too long, so let me jump on the actual idea.
Vault v.2.0.0.1 ( 
)In every round, half of the players will be winners, half of the players will be losers. That is a fact. "Dont lose" doesnt work here.
So far, winners gained advantage mostly through penalties on losing teams. I suggest that instead of penalties to losers, which is detrimental to gameplay in future rounds, we instead award winners.
Say each team starts with enough cards to make 8-9, whatever decks (number of total cards should be lower than we started War 1).
For every victory, they will loot certain number of cards (6-12), thus expanding their vault and gaining new options for building their decks.
Way of keeping score will be TERRITORY COUNT.
Losers would lose 0-6 cards and part of their Territory. (I know SG said it doesnt make sense to her that in a war you lose HP instead of troups. In war you lose territory, and you're out when you lost your territory. You certainly dont make suicide armies (decks) and send them to your enemy.
)
One another interesting idea that could be implemented here is "retreat", where after a first round, if you see you have zero chances against your opponents deck, you could choose to run away like a girl. Winning team gets all the normal spoils of the won battle, while losing team gets half of penalty. This would remove some "luck" factor in guessing game, while adding factor of skill of evaluating true strenght of your opponents deck vs yours.
That is the basic idea of vault mechanics that can be improved or built upon. Let me point out what I believe are advantages of this system over system we had in war 1:
- Most important thing: fun factor. You wont see system breakdowns after a bad start like we saw in some teams as losing matches does not penalize you in making strategies. Also, discarding is not fun, looting is.
- No suicide decks
- Comebacks are possible, making war more tense and interesting
- Removing the situations where unlucky scenario devastated your Vault, giving more room for showing deckbuilding/playing skill
- Retreat!
- Easy to implement "map" idea in the future
- Doesnt NEED "trading cards" system (making things more simple), although it CAN be implemented
- Overall much more simple way of keeping track of everything really.
