Elements

Elements is an online, fantasy-themed Collectible Card Game. As the online documentation puts it, "The player is an elemental, a spirit composed of an element; elements are the fundamental building blocks of nature. Each elemental has an arsenal of skills that can be used in a duel against another elemental; each skill corresponds to a card."

The game groups cards into three types:


 * Creatures: These attack your opponent, and can have useful abilities.
 * Spells: These give you an effect once, then disappear.
 * Permanents: These stay in play when you play them.

Permanents, in turn, include three important subtypes:


 * Pillars: These are your primary source of Quanta (singular Quantum). Quanta are the energy you use to play your other cards.
 * Some of which are Pendulums, which alternately give you quanta of their element and your "native" element (which you can change outside of duels).
 * Weapons: These are another way for you to attack your opponent, and most have useful abilities.
 * Shields: These defend you. Most focus on defending you against your opponent's attacks.

Also, the cards are divided into 12 different elements:


 * Aether: The power of the immaterial; Aether is the color to use for immortal creatures. It also includes some psionic abilities, including spell-copying.
 * Air: The power of the wind; Air doesn't have as much of a unifying strategy as some of the other elements, though it is a good element for creature removal.
 * Darkness: The power of the shadows; Darkness has a thing for healing you by hurting your opponent, and also allows you to steal your opponent's permanents and quanta.
 * Death: Power from the grave. Death allows you to poison your opponent and their creatures, and to benefit from creatures dying.
 * Earth: The power of the earth itself. Earth gives you ways to pump up your creatures' defense and bolster your own Hit Points; it also gives you the ability to destroy your opponent's pillars.
 * Entropy: The power of chaos. Entropy has a number of random effects, including mutating creatures.
 * Fire: The power of the flame. Most of Fire's creatures are strong attackers, but have little defense. Fire also provides removal for both creatures and permanents, and is one of the elements that can inflict burn damage to your opponent.
 * Gravity: The power of, well, gravity. Gravity tends to have creatures with high defense, and also can allow creatures to not be affected by shields. It can also rob your opponent of their quanta.
 * Life: The power of nature. Life's creatures tend to be simple beatsticks. Life is also one of the elements that allows you to heal yourself, and can allow creatures to attack more than once per turn.
 * Light: The power of light and divinity. Light allows you to heal yourself and your creatures.
 * Time: The power of the arrow of time. Time allows you to draw extra cards, stall your opponent's creatures, or even return creatures to the deck.
 * Water: The powers of water and ice. Water can freeze your opponent's creatures. Most of its creatures have control-oriented effects. Water also can allow you to turn your pillars into creatures.

You can find the game here.

This game provides examples of:

 * An Elemental Is You
 * All Your Powers Combined: Due mainly to the persistence of quanta from generation to use (with a computer tracking numbers, there's no need for a physical game's "tap to pay" system), it's actually practical to build decks using all 12 elements at once. In fact, using at least 5 is almost de rigueur when going up against False Gods.
 * Artificial Stupidity: While the AI is mostly competent, every once in a while, it will make some rather boneheaded moves. In particular, the AI doesn't seem to be able to realize that, "Hey, I've already got a weapon/shield, maybe I shouldn't play a different one."
 * Also, it likes to bury immortal creatures, as if gaining the meaningless defense bonus was worth halfing the creature's attack.
 * It will also draws using the Golden Hourglasses like crazy, often decking itself out in the process.
 * Cap: Your deck must be at least 30 cards, but it can't have more than 60. Also, you can never have more than 8 cards in your hand, and at the end of your turn, if you do have 8, you have to discard one. Other than pillars, you're not allowed to have more than 6 copies of any particular card in your deck. Finally, as of the latest versions, there is a cap of 75 for each individual type of quanta.
 * Also, Stone Skin/Granite Skin gives you extra HP equal to the number of Earth quanta you have -- but only up to 73-74.
 * There are also limits on the number of creatures in play (23).
 * Baleful Polymorph: Entropy has Mutation effects, which change one creature into another, randomly generated creature. These effects can be used on your own creatures, or on your opponent's.
 * Diminishing Returns for Balance: The Adrenaline effect gives a creature multiple attacks per turn. Bigger creatures get fewer extra attacks, and their attacks after the first will usually have less power.
 * Elemental Powers: Pretty much every single elemental power from healing to time and space manipulation is represented in one form or another.
 * Explosive Breeder: The Malignant Cell, which has very little attacking power in a game where creatures normally can't intercept attacks. What it can do is copy itself each turn, and so can the copies, up to the hard limit of the number of creatures a player can have in play. Most decks' capacity to kill their own creatures is decidedly limited... this creature is built to be given to an opponent as cancer.
 * Time's Deja Vu (a weak flyer) also splits into two copies. While this erases the splitting power on the copies, this game has no creature tokens - the copies are real cards, and so can be returned to the deck (which most Time decks can do ad infinitum). When a card leaves play, it returns to its pristine state and original text... so a Time player need never run out of Deja Vus (or out of cards, for that matter).
 * Fairy Battle: Before the Arena became the new asynchronous Pv P system, you could challenge AI-controlled copies of the Top 500 players' decks. Some players in the Top 500 would intentionally build their decks to include a few rare cards, but no way to play them, and no way to win the game; this makes those rare cards far easier to get.
 * Flawless Victory: If you can win the game with full Hit Points, you get double in-game money.
 * Note that this doesn't require you to have never been hurt, although it still usually requires a bit of skill.
 * Note also that you must have full Hit Points, not just as many as you started with. Some cards increase your maximum hit points. You do get extra money for winning with more than the base hit points, and you double that if you also are at your new max. The reverse happens if you have a lower max hp but are still full.
 * Gradual Grinder: This is Death's primary style, both against players and creatures. In this game, damage to the latter persists between turns.
 * And one of Darkness's secondary styles. Players can build an enormous quanta pool and often do. A focused Darkness player can still keep an opponent almost completely quantaless for most of the game with a bit of luck, and with Nightfall/Eclipse, can do slow damage using the same creatures.
 * I'm a Humanitarian: The Otyugh can eat pretty much anything, from germs to dragons, provided he's buffed enough.
 * Incredibly Lame Pun: The same symbol is used for Time and the in-game currency, Electrum. Like we've never seen that one before.
 * Luckily My Shield Will Protect Me: In addition to the creature, permanent, and spell cards the player character also has access to a variety of elemental shield cards. Its amazing how much the right type of shield can make or break a game.
 * Mirror Match: Aside from the usual, playing against a Darkness player can sometimes resemble one, when their deck can take your weapons, shields, and the pillars to power them. Or just appropriate the defenses you included against the usual mirror match...
 * Aether can be far worse. Theoretically, an Aether player can set up to play up to 6 copies of every card you draw, on the turn before you even draw it. That includes your quanta generators, so they can use those cards. Realistically, they can often manage at least 2 of your cards to your 1. While humming "Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better".
 * For bonus fun, pit two of these decks against each other. My card-copier generates multiple copies of your card-copier, then you catch mine with yours, and...
 * Money Grinding: You need money to buy cards, and you can also upgrade your cards for a whopping 1500 Electrum Coins each.
 * Nerf: Over time, a few cards have been changed or made more expensive to play to keep them from breaking the game.
 * Nigh Invulnerable: In this game, creatures normally attack your opponent directly, ignoring their creatures entirely. This is why players get weapons and shields - and both can be situationally very effective. Every element has at least one shield. Some elements can make you Made of Iron (or Rubber), able to ignore armies of weak attackers. Darkness, Water, and Aether can do a passable Made Of Air (in the form of Extreme Luck for the first two). Entropy can do a Mana Shield, in a game where there can be immense amounts of "mana" to pump into it.
 * Obvious Rule Patch: Flooding doesn't affect Water creatures (which makes sense), but it also doesn't affect neutral creatures. What neutral creatures does the game have? Neutral weapons when made into creatures by Flying Weapon/Animate Weapon, and Malignant Cell. That's it. So why does Flooding not affect neutral creatures? Because if it did, it would affect Malignant Cell.
 * For that matter, how about Malignant Cell being a neutral creature in the first place? Aflatoxin, the card that generates it, is a Death card. So why is Malignant Cell neutral instead of Death? To keep it from being affected (read: buffed) by Nightfall/Eclipse. For those who wonder why any of this would matter, Malignant Cell's effect is that it makes another of itself at the end of the turn. See Explosive Breeder above.
 * Our Dragons Are Different: There's a dragon for every element and no two are exactly alike.
 * Revive Kills Zombie: The card "Holy Light" is primarily used to restore hit points, but when used against a dark or death aligned target it deals damage instead. (Usually more then enough to kill even the strongest creatures in one hit.)
 * Rules Are for Humans: A player starts with 100 Hit Points, gets one free Quantum of one element each turn from his Mark, and draws 1 card per turn. The Level 5 computer players and Fake Gods start with 200 Hit Points, and draws 2 cards per turn. The Fake Gods also start with what is essentially two copies of a single normal deck. In short, they have twice as much everything as a normal player. Except for the Mark - they have triple the normal amount. For the Fake Gods, the game's pretty upfront about them not playing by the same rules.
 * On the bright side, you can get one prediction a day on exactly which False God you'll fight next, and their card lists and strategies are all wikied up.
 * Shout Out: Players can summon an earth based creature called a Graboid and then evolve it into a Shrieker.
 * Zerg Rush: This is usually the main strategy of mono life.
 * This is also the main strategy of basically everybody in PVP-1 some days...
 * Which can be painful facing somebody who can simply ignore weak attacks. The more so if the rusher hit the creature cap early and lacks free space to summon anything effective.

This game notably averts:

 * Bribing Your Way to Victory: The game's free to play, and donating money doesn't give you any noticeable advantage. While you will get a card for a big enough donation, said card can be gotten without donating.
 * Game Breaker: While some individual cards or combos can be a little insane, the game manages to be pretty well-balanced.