Have you ever played Don't Starve? It's a survival game where you start with nothing but your chosen W-named character. In order to progress, you have to scrounge together arcane research infrastructure to unlock better items, and your basic quality of life survival gear is locked behind a tech tree.

Unless, you play as Wickerbottom. She starts the game with tier 1 tech already unlocked, so you can make a backpack out of grass in the first 30 seconds and not have to worry about getting gold nuggets for a science machine.

Elementalist is the Wickerbottom of SCR. Any single-threshold spell can be played with total impunity, with double threshold becoming effectively single and triple becoming double. Everything is easier to play and lets you splash anything you want. AND it gives you room to play neutral utility sites you couldn't otherwise afford. Who needs a baked-in draw or removal gimmick when you can play Bumpy Road?

It requires no equipment. (except Amulet. It's just nice) Your creatures will already be unmatched in size, and hopefully in speed if your sites come out right. I had Ponds earlier to support more Beast ramp but it wasn't enough for Lugbogs and you can't burrow a Root Spider under it. They were replaced by Beacons, which get you endgame minions earlier the more aggressive your opponent is. You don't have to be afraid of early flyers or token swarms when Hillock Basilisk just shuts everything down.

My favorite design challenge was making card draw happen in an avatar with no card draw. But with Unlikely Alliance, you can draw plenty. That's what the Falconer is there for. Play him to get a Bat, that's your Elite and Ordinary, and then everything else on the curve is either Exceptional or Unique. You'll draw at least three cards off the draw spell, on curve. And from there you lock down the board and crush them. (He kinda got power-crept, burrowers aren't really meta anymore and I have almost enough uniques to run King's Council instead.)

In my design scope, this deck was meant to fight three specific matchups: The Battlemage, the Witch, and the Geomancer. (Updates will fight Magoo Control and eventually, dear reader, the dreaded Atlantic Netdeckmancer. One day. Soon.)

The first is why I still have Troll Bridges as a deterrent despite not needing water mana. Any site that can eat minions is a good thing. Getting blocked and smacked in the face at every turn is, or was, the primary purpose of the land base. We can afford not to have exact element-fixing early because we are Wickerbottom. We play Hillock Basilisk with no red mana because we can.

The second is far more popular where I play, with the LGS employees themselves running fades with Powries and Scarabs. Ramping out a Vampire early solves the Witch problem singlehandedly, along with the Bumpy Road bodying half their whole deck. The only reason you don't have a full three Vampires is you only need one. (Couldn't resist. When someone Chaos Twisters the first two against each other, you need a third to keep pressure up.)(FIVE! FIVE VAMPIRES, AH AH AH)

The third and most popular among netdeckers at my store, the Geomancer is the noob-friendly king of ramp, which constitutes about half of the real meta and also relies on bigger Beasts than you. But you can shut down their primary advantage with Kingswood Poachers. Call to War only has two targets in the deck, one is White Knight for the Witch matchup and the other is for annihilating every copy of Conqueror Worm and/or Root Spider in their whole deck. Wickerbottom is faster and curves out earlier than Geomancer, but it can't afford to lose multiple sites to the Worm. You have more than enough raw power to defeat them if you take their endgame out of the equation. (Feast for Crows is also good to this end for fighting combos and recursion in case you are not against Worms or they have it in their hand already.)

I always wondered why every deck has one weird out of place Aura, but this one is very obvious when you play. It kills burrowed stuff, it kills stealthed stuff, and it makes everyone run away. If you're on Death's Door, drop the Plague. Your six-power minions will waltz into formerly fortified enemy positions with impunity against the routing and winnowing forces of the enemy. Also good for smoking out enemy Pudges, whose deaths will free up movement and keep your plague alive. It makes good use of your tiny critters late-game and forces units into killboxes for your own Butchers. And hey, if you choose not to fight with them, your own Pudges can rope in fleeing sacrifices they would otherwise trade with. Anything that ends its turn in the radius will be forfeit. (And despite token spam, a well-placed Plague against Necromancer smokes out Nixies and scares away Lacunae that would intrude on your land.) Both offensive and defensive uses, well costed, and for you, perfectly splashable. (Sorry it's so expensive now, but it is worth it.)

As for upgrades, it's really meta dependent. Found in testing that Perceval was a nonbo with Gnome Hollows as he could safely never reach the Grail, so he came out for a second Poachers. It really isn't easy to make this deck any stronger than it is now. I think even an Archimago would have trouble with it. You could try putting Ponds back in to make a turn 3 Basilisk more achievable, but Beacon does the same thing without diluting the threshold, and has the potential to get out a Vampire or Sky Baron on only four sites, and that's way better than having to draw more sites. Good site mulligans to this end are the best skill you can have. (turned out that Hollows was such a horrible nonbo for so little benefit that it came out for Updraft. Ten flyers in the deck now, and they can all jump an entrenched avatar from across the board.)(Wuthering is so much better!!)

Oh, and lastly: you don't NEED the Cores. (Or the other god-tier artifacts. They get nuked very easily by Unravel and the like. The Ring has yet to prove itself in this build.) I just have them and they help on rare occasion. The Mixes do a lot more work and are more worth your money. You can always run more Common Senses or relic removal if your meta is different or your budget is lower. I recommend Shatter Strike for extra damage output against a fleeing enemy, or a Leap Strike for diagonal Lamorak action if divebombing the enemy radar dish is your thrill. (A friend kindly demonstrated that Whirling Blades is waaaay better for lifelink abuse, regrow your whole health bar at once!)