A lot of people, including myself, have been looking at blockchain games lately and whenever a new one pops up one of the first questions that comes to mind is: "is it pay 2 win?". Not surprising considering many of these lay so much weight on investors and at the same time fund development and growth by selling people ingame items such as genesis assets that may not be obtained later on to prove the point that "you should get in on this cause you can make a decent return". Now while this is understandable marketing considering the many projects in crypto that to investors do really well so blockchain games feel the need to try and compete with them, to regular players this may not feel that great if they aren't able to purchase assets worth $100-10,000. Even more so if these assets are crucial to the gameplay and competitive scene.
Now I don't have too much experience with competitive play in most popular blockchain games that exist today, I threw my hat into the ring for a very short period in the early stages of 
I invested in the Genesis Cards of this game pretty early, I think my average buy in was around $120 per Ethereum and even though it's going to be a steep hill to climb considering ETH's performance recently, the NFT hype is growing day by day so I may still do well in $ returns once these assets become tradable again and the game grows from its current stages with something we also lack here on Hive; marketing.
Okay so back to my point, many have been complaining that Gods Unchained is pay 2 win, new players don't have Genesis Cards, they can't even purchase them even if they wanted to and feel that players/investors who do have them have a too big of an advantage in the game using these cards.
Time and time again, though, it has been proven that Gods Unchained has made access to competitive cards and decks for anyone starting out have a real shot at "play 2 earn". Even though it doesn't mean much right now, cause the only way to earn cards from the current season that's for sale right now (through credit cards obviously cause ETH is unusable), is to participate in the weekend tournaments where you have a shot to win season 2 "trial of the gods" packs depending on your performance during those 3 days every weekend.
There is a website called gudecks.com that tracks your performance and let's you know how close you are to getting to the next reward tier and how many of the required weekend games you've played so far. It displays it like this:
What got me to write this post in the first place was that there was a reddit post in the gods unchained subreddit recently stating that a new player has made it to the Mythic rank of Gods Unchained. Now to many this may seem too good to be true, how can a new player without being able to purchase Genesis Cards perform so well. Well the reason this is nothing "new" and that many players have managed to do just as good in the past is that the way Gods Unchained works is different from other games, skill and strategy here matters. Now I'm not going to tell you that having all Genesis Cards or all Trial of the Gods cards is not going to help you, but just having the latter without the skill won't and I'm a prime example of that. I own all Gensis cards, and even though I don't own all Trial of the Gods cards (not even close) cause the bear market was a bit too long for us Hivers and there's no way I'm going to be selling Hive at these prices to invest more in GU than I already have. I figured I'd try for fun to re-create this new players deck and see how well I'd do playing it.
On the gudecks.com site I was able to find the Reddit user as he was using the same name and is currently ranked #13 of all players, there I could see what decks he's been playing with and his performance with each. My eyes of course landed on this one Light Deck that had an amazing 11 wins, 0 losses streak going so I attempted to copy it.
After I was done copying it, I decided to record some gameplay to show you who don't know about Gods Unchained what the game is like so you can better understand how playstyle, RNG, Gods, God Powers and especially the Sanctum can effect the matches more than what cards you're holding and how much money you've spent on them. As you can see from the screenshot above estimated price for that deck is 0.0334 ETH which is quite a bit of money right now but once the markets open again and these core cards can be sold once more (and there's a lot more of these core cards that have been created during the downtime of the markets) I'm sure it's going to become even cheaper.
This was a pretty interesting game and it also shows how important the Sanctum is which is something that has set the game aside a lot from Hearthstone ever since it's implementation. It also goes to show that new players like the one mentioned above who just spend some time playing with the welcome starter decks can get themselves some core cards by leveling up and use them to do well in the weekend tournaments to earn packs they may be able to sell later if they don't need the cards themselves.
Apologies for the aspect ratio, not sure why it decided to record it this way.
So what will happen when the markets arrive and all these cards are available for selling again, will it become pay 2 win then? Well, yes and no, it will surely take a lot of time and grind off of new players who are just getting into the game. They won't need to level up as much to get the core cards they want to play, especially the legendary core cards, but it's still important to know how to play to get far in the game, cards alone won't get you there which is what this post was about. Trust me, I've seen players like 
If you haven't played Gods Unchained yet and would like to give it a try (it is free to play), I'd appreciate it if you used my invite link.
Let me know how it goes, if and when immutable X launches that will make all assets tradable again I'm planning on further growing the Gods Unchained OCD team and even offering leasing of cards to players who want to continue playing it but not buy the cards off the market, hopefully IMX makes leasing available just like
