new/ hero/villain dice card game

It just so happens that Taoism represent the "Chinese elements" in something akin to an RPS-5.

Rather than having generative relationships, you can reverse those arrows and use consuming relationships instead. Reskin "wood" as "nature" and "metal" as "tech" then that gives you:

• Nature dominates Earth and Water
• Fire dominates Nature and Tech
• Earth dominates Fire and Water
• Tech dominates Earth and Nature
• Water dominates Tech and Fire

Dominance could have an effect such as an extra fist/crosshair, or double damage, or half defense, or whatever.

Assign die colors to adjacent elements:

• Yellow: Nature and Fire
• Red: Fire and Earth
• Gray: Earth and Tech
• Blue: Tech and Water
• Green: Water and Nature

These would be the color pairs used in the card image background.

So the fire-based character has a choice of a Red or Yellow die, a tech-based character has a choice of a Blue or Gray die, etc. Example faces for these dice:

• Blue: star, star, double star, HEART, SHIELD, DOUBLE SHIELD
• Gray: star, star, double star, SHIELD, FIST, DOUBLE FIST
• Green: star, star, double star, CROSSHAIR, HEART, DOUBLE HEART
• Red: star, star, double star, FIST, SPEECH, DOUBLE SPEECH
• Yellow: star, star, double star, SPEECH, CROSSHAIR, DOUBLE CROSSHAIR

Note that there's no reason to bring actual elemental metaphysics into the game, the dominance kinda makes sense on its own (if I douse a fire with water it fizzles out... and if I douse a piece of tech with water it fizzles out).

Yes, the original "Overcoming reaction" (e.g., fire melts metal) is dominant/advantaged. The original "Generating reaction" (e.g., wood feeds fire) is reversed and also is dominant/advantaged.

The one problem is that jedite1000 has an example or two of Unlife characters, and Unlife does not fit well in this set of elements. I'd probably assign ghostly types to Water if I had to make a choice. Demonic types can go under Fire.

Adjacent elements are just ones located next to each other on the figure. I just made up the colors, with an attempt to make pairs that seem to make sense. They all happen to be available on TGC.

Least happy with green-and-yellow for Nature. The "yellow" here is shared with Fire while the "green" is shared with Water. Green seemed kinda mandatory for Nature, so the only flexibility is with the yellow. Might have picked brown, except that TGC discontinued their brown dice.

And that is how you get yellow-and-green for Nature.

This was in reference to the earlier idea that there is a pool of action dice, a pool of reaction dice, and then one "personal die" for each active or targeted character.

The pool dice need to be assigned to someone to have any effect, and can form combos with the personal die. For example, a defending character might roll a shield on a personal die and combine it with a shield and a speech from the reaction pool to activate some kind of power.

It's up to jedite1000 if a character picks a die when they first get revealed, or can pick each time they need to roll a personal die.

Me either. That draft basically has 3 sides common to all personal dice and 3 sides tilted toward the "color."

Not sure how many would be in the box, but these "color" dice are in addition to the base action and reaction dice we started with. Those were originally going to be red and blue, respectively, but white and black seem more likely if jedite1000 adopts some or all of these suggestions.

So, if the rule is a side can have at most N personal dice of a particular color, the box would include:

5 or 6 action dice (white?)
5 or 6 reaction dice (black?)
2N blue dice
2N gray dice
2N green dice
2N red dice
2N yellow dice

No problem, helps to know when I'm not being clear.