Heres an odd thought.
What if we treated cards like "moves" or skills the player had learned. The player may take any number of a certain "move" in his deck once he's learned it.
For instance, as a reward for completing the "Spider-witch" quest, the player "learns" to use phase spiders and recluses. At the start of the event you're stuck with mono, true, but you aren't restricted to a "vault" per-se. Then, as the game progresses, you can learn moves from your enemies, and from quests, and slowly expand your knowledge of the game. This could include pillars/pendulums/marks, or it might not.
The underworld is supposed to be a bunch of rebels, right? So as part of their character, they technically are an elemental from one of the original 12 elements. They'd get to pick which elemental they are and which "moves" they start with.
Of course, this completely wrecks a lot of earlier ideas.
Interesting idea. But like you said, it would change a lot of things. Probably too big of a change.
One other option is to give players new marks based on level (just thought about this a second ago). For example, every two levels, you get one new mark.
level 1: 1 mark
level 2: 1 mark
level 3: 2 marks
level 4: 2 marks
level 5: 3 marks
level 6: 3 marks
etc.
I really like this system. Not only is it very simple, but I think it's elegant, as well.
I also like the reputation changes for (not) using your element's cards. There could be a cutoff (say, 50%), where using less than that percentage of your element starts negative reputation with your element, and using more than a certain percentage (maybe 80% or 85%) nets you positive reputation with your element. If we want less restrictions, the negative reputation part could be dropped whilst still providing a reason to use your own element.
...Now just how the hell does such a thing work for Underworld? Possibly not at all.
I had a very similar idea regarding decks and reputation changes, although my version had 4 possibilities. Your 3 is better. But I think that having percentages like 80% is way too complex and people will fail in math. A more simple version would be to reward a
mono-deck with +1.
One thing that concerns me though.. if we have a high level rich 
player, he or she could potentially play anything BUT . This is a problem, because if we have a person with a "Champion of Life" title, one might think that the person actually uses light. If this person attacks with 
cards, I think that it would be kind of lame.
Upgrading skill tree would make his life decks better no? Meaning playing with cards from other elements would negate his skill level - which is penalty on its own. But, skill tree is still not defined, so we dont know if it would work that way yet.
I'm not in favor of War rules here. Not only because its repetitive, but also because elements ARE imbalanced, and IMO powerful 
player should be able to go wreck havoc in entropy or fire territory. Issue is that players dont start with huge Vault like in the war. They dont get to pull duo element to counter whatever comes in front of them, so elemental differences will be even more pronounced.
Skills don't generally make your cards better. I thought that it would be better to keep the two separate so that people have more options, and can make more interesting combinations, like Shaman Engineer who uses
decks. My plan was that only the "Champion" skill would actually give you some upped cards or something. But that's not set in stone just yet.
I agree that War deckbuilding rules have big potential in making deckbuilding boring. I would probably be a bad move to have two of the biggest events have the same deckbuilding rules.
Are we using a vault for WoE? Is that concept set in stone?
Each player will get their own personal Character Sheet and Vault. This way they do all the work and we don't need a dedicated WoE staff member to micro-manage Vaults.
I think he means vault in the sense of personal library of cards.
Also, with all this talk of different things affecting reputation, who exactly is keeping track of all that? It seems like a lot of work for organizers if players aren'd doing it.
Players are doing it.
