Welcome to the the twenty-eighty edition of the Gods Unchained Weekly Recap! The world has not gotten any less crazy in the past week, unfortunately. The Immutable team is telecommuting as much as they can and still working on keeping the updates coming.

This issue also marks a bit of change for this report. From now on, I will be writing these weekly summaries on Mondays so I can also include a brief report on the weekend Meta.

Official Content



This week's official stream was with Derek and Andrea and we were treated to our fifth Champion reveal, Selena, the Champion of Nature.

As expected, she is of the Amazon tribe and has a very nifty ability in addition to Backline and Ward would should help to help keep her around for more than a turn.



Several other cards were revealed including, Selena's Bow, Trial of the False Reflection (which looks to be a very nifty Magic spell), Selena's Insight, and a Quarrelsome Goat. You can view the stream here - https://www.twitch.tv/videos/570079264

Selena's backstory is available on the official blog - https://blog.godsunchained.com/2020/03/19/chapter-6-selenas-origin-truth-is-told-by-moonlight/

Balance Changes



Another big Sanctum change this week! The Favor cost for all cards in the Sanctum has been doubled! This is an interesting change and one that I imagine will shift the meta more towards Control. I like this move to make the Sanctum one part of the game rather than being the primary focus. I still think that the card selection should be changed to contain less removal and fewer God-specific cards (I'm also not entirely sure what the point is of having the various 'decks' in the Sanctum), but it's good to know that the team is open to experimentation and continued tweaking of the system.

Marketplace



After a brief hiatus due to Ethereum Network congestion, Fusing has been re-enabled and you can once again use your Flux to put Core cards onto the blockchain. The fact that the entire system had to be paused at all does make one wonder how this will be handled in the future. Presumably, once the game is officially released and the playerbase is much larger, it won't be feasible to simply shut down Fusing every time the network becomes heavily loaded. Though of course network congestion is not an issue specific to GU.

GU cards has added a new feature to their site -- a nice looking page showing us the overall market activity for Gods Unchained. You can view the post about it here - https://www.reddit.com/r/GodsUnchained/comments/fmy8a3/market_overview_a_new_realm_on_gucards/



Immutable has released their latest Marketplace Insights blog - https://blog.godsunchained.com/2020/03/18/official-marketplace-top-20-cards-analysis-insights-week-13-14/

Dev Update



Dev Update #9 was posted on Thursday.



Coming up soonest on the release list will be the final Champion reveal (War, most likely a Viking), completion of the Blessed Ibis distribution, and the adding all the raffle rewards onto the blockchain as NFTs!

You can read the full text here - https://www.reddit.com/r/GodsUnchained/comments/flkpu1/weekly_dev_update_9/

Meta



The more the meta changes, the more it stays the same. It's probably not surprising to anyone that Slayer is the most often played. Not only is it a strong, viable deck, but the matches tend to end quickly, allowing for more victory opportunities over time, which is a strongly desired characteristic during Ranked Weekend.

The charts below (thanks to GU Decks!), show a very interesting dichotomy. The first chart shows the God Power ranks and usage over the last three days for all players, while the second chart shows the same data but just for Mythic ranks. Slayer is still very popular at Mythic, in fact, even more so, accounting for over 23% of the God Powers selected!

But even more interesting than that, is the fact that only five out of the 24 God Powers had a greater than 50% winrate at Mythic rank!

The meta will take some time to adjust to the recent Sanctum change, but this concentration of wins among a very small selection of the available God Powers is not a good direction for having a fun, balanced game. I am very eager for the arrival of Season One to bring us a slew of new cards, more balance changes, and hopefully many new deck ideas!

One final note. For anyone wanting to try and play on a Linux machine, merklemerk wrote up a guide on how to do so -- https://www.reddit.com/r/GodsUnchained/comments/fmtruz/guide_how_to_play_on_linux/ !

Good thoughts out to everyone. Stay well and be good to each other!

Gods Unchained is an online, collectible card game with true ownership of your cards. The card information is stored on the Ethereum blockchain, so the cards can be traded, bought and sold in any NFT market, while the game itself runs off-chain, so there are no transaction fees involved when playing. The game is free to play, and you can get started now.

Article written by CryptozNewb