Gods Unchained

Introduction

Don’t you wish you could sell all the cards you bought on Hearthstone when you stopped playing? Or sold one of the legendary cards in Legends of Runeterra instead of disenchanting them for peanuts? Gods Unchained is one of the original and oldest web3 games to exist, and serves the card genre right by giving players a quality game to enjoy and keep coming back to.

Gods Unchained is a free-to-play trading card game where players compete in epic duels using fantasy cards. The game provides a dynamic and competitive experience with a strong focus on strategy. Gods Unchained provides real ownership over in-game assets by turning them into NFTs, allowing players to effectively trade their items for real money.

Gameplay

Gods Unchained draws several mechanisms from Magic: The Gathering in particular, which is understandable considering Chris Clay’s leadership role, the former game director of Magic: The Gathering Arena. Players need to select one of six available gods, and fill out their 30-card deck accordingly depending on their choice for synergy.

Similar to Hearthstone, but not quite, each god has a corresponding list of special powers to choose from, four to be exact. Each game you are allowed to choose only one, the most suitable to counter your opponent’s style of play in your opinion. It comes at a mana cost so keep that in mind as well in terms of how much value it can bring you.

Mulligan

At the start of the game, you are prompted 5 times with 3 cards to choose one to form your starting hand. You gain one mana each round up to the 5th round, where the 6th and 7th mana slots take 2 turns, 8th mana slot takes 3 turns, and the 9th and final mana slot takes 4 turns. 

However, there are 3 mana pip slots available to each player, where you can use a “bag of tricks” to get yourself an extra mana point to play higher value cards.

Favor

As your match progresses, players accumulate Favor points through completing certain actions. You gain Favor passively through completing turns, and the longer the game goes, the faster you stack them. Other actions that help you gather them quicker are attacking your opponent’s god directly, one of your cards survives an attack and kills the opposing character in return, and so on. 

These are redeemable points for cards belonging to all six gods rather than being restricted to the one you chose to build your deck around, Favor points disappear at the end of every match, so they aren’t accumulated or stored in any way outside of the ongoing game.

Review

As of their official reporting in September 2021, Gods Unchained achieved over $34M in NFT cards trading volume with over 450,000 registered players. There is no denying they cemented themselves as a behemoth in the web3 gaming and blockchain card games world. 

However, there is no game without flaws. Connectivity and server issues still persist and annoy players from time to time, but the most commonly reported amongst its community is certain cards deemed too broken for their own good. These cards can be obtained directly from the marketplace, but gives the players an unfair advantage in certain situations, deeming the match almost unwinnable for your opponent.

The round timers and ridiculously long animations, from triggered combos or summons, are what completely threw me off. Certain combos, like the Scurry Oak, can legitimately take up to 15 minutes to end. At the same time, the game auto-surrenders for you if you are away from the keyboard prior to the start of your round. Timers are heavily disproportionate in the current patch of the game as of the time of writing, 0.63.