Free Essence/Vigor

Okay, not "free" as in "unlimited". Rather, eliminating it from the card pool, partially anyway. My suggestion is to go the route of Pokemon TCG Pocket Energy and allow BASIC essences to be gained for free, with some caveats/modifications.

So Pokemon TCG Pocket makes energy its own spot with a guaranteed one at the start of each turn (except the very first). If a deck uses more than one energy type, the type is chosen at random. You can also see which energy will be given to you at the start of your next turn.

What my exact suggestion is would be to do the following instead. We have a spot for drawing "a new essence". That essence will be the equivalent of a basic essence card as they are now. Like Pokemon TCG Pocket, we can see what the current one is and the next one that will be available. However, we still have the advanced essence cards as well. In keeping with the 1 essence limit, playing those cards from the hand will consume/exhaust the essence card that's presently available to be activated.

By doing this, we can reduce the deck bloat that is essence draws and speed up the game a bit without totally sacrificing "which essence should I use?" Characters may even want to forego the free essence to make use of abilities (like Cinder as she is now). We can also make this a mechanic that's based on the played character, where certain characters can only generate certain essences. While it would somewhat restrict deck building, it adds a degree of strategy as well because certain advance essence cards could bypass that restriction as well.

Marigold's Ability

Right now, it's very unsatisfying and needs massive setup to do anything meaningful. Needing followers to do damage is just far too much of a handicap. And Cinder's clearing whatever followers Marigold can put up far too easily (a critique I've brought up before). 

My suggestion is that she can swallow (exhaust) an enemy Follower that is smaller than she is and gain a portion of their size when swallowed.

Since her style is to keep growing herself and her followers, it makes a lot more sense to make her more of a threat the bigger she's allowed to get. This changes her ability from a 4 Vigor 1 damage (worst case scenario, which is too often) to "I can eliminate any follower if you don't win quickly"; reinforcing her intended play style. Naturally, this would come at a higher vigor cost (my suggestion is 6 vigor 2 Green).

Some better cards for Marigold

This is partly because of the disparity I see with Cinder regularly nuking Marigold's followers far too easily. I know you plan to add more anyway, but for the sake of "give Marigold better odds", I think she needs a few emergency cards swapped in so she can keep up with Cinder's nukes.

• A Boa Lamia, a massive version of the Garter Lamia. Preferably with the ability to grow by absorbing a follower it defeats and recovering Lilumi in turn.
• A structure that recovers Lilumi and grows Marigold.
• A Talisman to reduce physical damage based on size.
• A Talisman that grows all followers present when played.
• some more draw power (Cinder literally has more and better draw cards)

Something for if/when the deck runs out

This can be something to help end the game, like stacking exhaustion. Or it can be "shuffle the exhaust into a new deck" so things can keep going without rushing. I think "end the game" is probably more favorable, but it is something that needs to be decided on, even though it's not really an issue currently with where the game is.

Hey AzureDragoon,

Thanks for the feedback as always.

Free Essence/Vigor
The gameplan was not to use a system that forgoes the energy system and guaranteeing a steady ramp up of essence or vigor such as Pokémon Pocket, Hearthstone, Riftbound, etc. But more of a Magic, Dual Masters, or Old School Pokémon system. Now this was for a couple of reasons. The big one is that I don't like that those previous games effectively homogenize the amount of resources that each player gets by making them effectively common, player's tend to grow the resources at the same rate. In a game with a more variable energy system, you have the ability to much better have a little guy that values small aggressive attacks vs a big player that invests their cards and resources into energy and slams down scary followers. This does come with costs such as the deck bloat mentioned, and increases in dead turns as you draw excess essences, but this does also allow you to weave cards with the character ability, and dead turns allows passive effects that need a long time to pay off such as flowering dryad to pay off. Your advice is great advice so don't take this as me saying the idea is bad, because it is not, but it is not the system I have in mind for this game.

Marigold's Ability
You are correct in that the ability is on the weaker side. My hope is to balance weaker abilities with other benefits that the character is going to have which will be available in future builds, but it is also okay to have weaker and stronger characters, as long as you have fun with what they are doing. Your suggestion for the eat and grow mechanic, I promise you there is a character that has that almost exact ability, but they are not in the game yet, and because of that I don't want to put it on Marigold and have a duplicate ability. Cinder's deck will be weakened in the next build as well to alleviate this until I get further into the development of the game.

Better Cards for Marigold
All good card ideas. I've got a little bit to go before I do another batch of cards, but once I do I promise that both decks, plus other characters will be more coherent. In the short term, the plan is still to weaken Cinder's deck slightly. But for the next build, I'm also hoping that this will all be less relevant as you will have the ability to play any deck you want.

Deck Empty
The deck emptying is pretty rare, as in I don't think I have ever realistically encountered it in hundreds of self or AI test games. But the gameplan for emptying decks right now is not to shuffle it back. Especially because shuffling back all your essences would be pretty detrimental and shuffling it back also makes future designs awkward for cards or effects that return cards from your exhaust to your hand or field, or for cards and effects that get stronger or weaker based on the number of exhausted cards. Instead, this was to be circumvented through cards that can create and shuffle cards into your deck, or by cards that can move cards from your exhaust on to the bottom of your deck to prevent you from ever running out of resources. There is also an audience, such as myself, who likes to win the game not by reducing the opponents lilumi to zero, but instead to run them out of resources entirely and then winning on their own terms at their leisure. This also allows a deck that just wants to control the opposing character and eventually win to exist. Now in the scenario where both characters have no cards in deck, and no followers, then some characters abilities will be the deciding factor, like Cinder's will eventually just take out the other character by slowing burning them. Now if for some reason there is just no way to win or lose anymore as all cards are gone, all threats are gone, and there is no other way to win or lose, at that point I'll either implement a turn limit to end the battle, or realistically if you got to that point, I would say that you and  your character have lost and you have the ability to give up the battle at any time.

-Celes