TL;DR - This is a budget for deck creation (this assumes a 20-card deck), where each card has a Rank, and each deck has a max total Rank, wich is the limit the sum of all card Ranks in it cannot exceed.
Cards above 20 in the deck, add points to the max total Rank, and characters such as have their Rank multiplied by the number of characters they count for.

The goal is making it so that you can't just fill your deck with just Rank 3 cards.
---

This works perfectly with my Elite card Stat suggestion presented below.

It also allows Rooms and Tournaments to be created with ranges of Deck Rank.
---

[The Suggestion] - The numbers here are Hypotetical...
- See Rank as a Deck Budget or Deck Cost.
- Each card (characters included) has a Rank, between 1 and 3, according to it's usefulness/power
- Characters may have a bigger Rank range, between 1 and 6, allowing the developpers to distinguish characters and make even the weakest character useful in a way by giving him a low Rank.
- Each deck can have a max total Rank of 50.
- Each non-character card above 20 in the Deck increases the max total Rank by 3.
I think it should be 3, because as a deck becomes bigger, the chances of drawing intended cards are reduced, thus allowing a higher average card Rank is decent compensation.
The argument towards making it 2, is that it's closest to the average card Rank of a 23 card Deck (~2,17, see Math below).

[Math]
- The minimum amount of cards a Deck can have is 23 cards (characters included)
- 23x3 = 69 -> Maximum Rank
- 20x3 + 3x6 = 78 -> Maximum Rank if characters have between 1 and 6 Rank
- 23x1 = 23 -> Minimum Rank

[Result]
- A deck can only have a maximum average card Rank of ~2.17, wich means you can't fill a deck with Rank 3 cards.
- Acording to the above math, you can only use at most 4x Rank 3 cards in a deck without needing to use Rank 1 cards.
- If Character Ranks go all the way to 6, you can either use 4x Rank 3 cards; 2x Rank 3 cards & 1x Rank 4 character; 1x Rank 3 cards & 1x Rank 5 character or 1x Rank 6 character, in a deck without Rank 1 cards

[Conclusion]
Even less need to ban cards or decks - you just wouldn't be able to shove countless Legendary, awesome Rares, insane Uncommons and incredible Commons in your decks.

To dismistify your tainted ideas, you would have ALOT more customization power, not less.
Right now you are forced to use certain cards to be competitive. Little room for inventiveness.
With this, cards being given proper Rank, you would be able to build dozens of competitive decks for each Caste, and would see less mirror matches, would feel more unique, and your genius would be more rewarded.

I thought I'd put this suggestion out here to be more visible, as well as clearing it up a bit.

So there have been going around complaints about certain decks or cards being overpowered; Legendaries being too expensive and otherwise unfair for competitiveness; your favorite cards/decks being banned for too long; etc.

In most if not all cases of "overpoweredness" there isn't a single card at fault, but rather a whole combo that is too effective.

The suggestion below is about branding certain cards "above average" so that u can only have a maximum amount of them in the deck, rather than banning cards.

[The Suggestion - Elite Cards]
- Certain cards are given the Elite stat when considered too strong.
- You can only have 3 Elite cards in a deck.

What it is:
- A "visible" card stat just like Unique.
- A way to keep balance in check.
- A way to keep all decks alive by not banning any cards.
- A way to promote deck variants - thanks to GKZhukov (http://forum.eredan.com/viewtopic.php?pid=362748#p362748)


What it is not:
- A "hidden" property like "Banned from ELO".
- A way to nerf my most hated and/or buff my favorite deck

[How does this work/fix anything?]
Note: The example below is not a rant against Discard decks, just an hypotetical situation.
Let's just pretend , , , and are considered too powerful when together in the same deck.

Then imagine that:
The Prestige, Mental Syphon and Treacherous are Elite.
That means you can have one of the below combos in your deck:
- 1 The Prestige + 1 Mental Syphon + 1 Treacherous (+ 3 Theft + 3 Panic)
- 1 The Prestige + 2 Treacherous (+ 3 Theft + 3 Panic)
- 1 Mental Syphon + 2 Treacherous (+ 3 Theft + 3 Panic)
- 3 Treacherous (+ 3 Theft + 3 Panic)

Or, imagine that:
Treacherous and Theft are Elite.
That means you can have one of the below combos in your deck:
- (1 The Prestige + 1 Mental Syphon +3 Panic) + 3 Treacherous
- (1 The Prestige + 1 Mental Syphon +3 Panic) + 2 Treacherous + 1 Theft
- (1 The Prestige + 1 Mental Syphon +3 Panic) + 1 Treacherous + 2 Theft
- (1 The Prestige + 1 Mental Syphon +3 Panic) + 3 Theft

This is just hypotetically speaking!

Above you can see many variants for the same theme: Circus Discard.
As pointed out by GKZhukov, you would see similarly themed decks taking on completely different directions - not because of your Crystal/Feez limitations, but because of your own preference and creativity.

Result?
- Feerik is able to "tune" a deck without banning cards.
- If a deck needs further tuning, all that needs to be done is change wich and how many cards are Elite.
- The bottom line is that it allows Feerik to remove the O from OP without banning cards by instead creating a system that limits how many "OP" cards are put together in the same deck.

This new idea is a mix of the Rank Stat and Elite Stat - a budgeted Elite Stat:
- Certain cards are given Elite (X)" stat
Example: Elite: 3
- Each deck can only have a total maximum of Y Elite value
Example: limit is 10, you can have 2x "Elite (3)" and 2x "Elite (2)" OR 3x "Elite (3)" and 1x "Elite (1)".


Feerik could implement #1, #2, #3, #1 + #2 or #2 + #3, as they work perfectly okay.

With any of those combinations, Feerik can finally balance decks without the need to ban cards at all. Period.

This way you:
- have more deck variants because you can't just shove everything into a deck
- know all your favorite cards will never be simply banned

It seems to me that all your proposals are the same and not really different from the current system.

Current system is: Deck containing listed cards is invalid. Your proposals are: Deck containing (some calculation of card ranks) is invalid. And you need someone to decide card ranks.

So you enable more fine-grained banning , but you need additional complexity and the system does not balance itself, you need someone to keep the balance.

I think any real solution would need more radical change such as (just an example, likely not working): for each deck calculate similarity to recent successful decks. If all characters in the battle are dead, the winner of the game is the one with more innovative deck.