Recently, I've been a bit busier with real-life commitments and found myself to be dedicating less time to Gods Unchained. The current state of the game also led me to be rather frustrated, first with Dralamar (which is thankfully "fixed", although I fear its comeback at a later time), and now with Light's overwhelming presence if it goes first. The combination of these two factors led me to decide to play with a new deck archetype just for a change of pace - but oh boy was it not fun getting pummelled by the other decks on the ladder!
Giveaway Results
Every week, I give away a few units of Hive SBI which help to upvote your Hive posts for visibility and rewards for as long as they run - you don't have to do anything on your part. I explained the mechanics of how this giveaway works in another Weekend Ranked Rundown post, but in short, the more active you are in the GU Hive community, the more chances you have to win. You can check your HBI status here.
This week's winners:
Deck Overview
Deck Link: GUDecks
This was a rather badly-optimized Hidden Rush Deception deck - in hindsight, I should have stuck to an earlier netdeck-ed version rather than making a few of my own changes, but hindsight is always 20/20. This was my first time playing Deception during the Weekend Ranked, and although I had tried it out in a good number of matches before the weekend started, it proved to be worthless in the face of bad matchups (which surprisingly, there are many).
When the deck works well, it can finish opponents off quickly. Dark Knives on Shadow of Lethenon can win games on its own, although it isn't too likely. I think the problem with this abomination of a Hidden Rush deck is that it's not aggressive enough, having to become the "control" deck when fighting head-to-head with another aggro deck.
Some of my thoughts on my (bad) choices:
After fiddling around with an initial version of the Hidden Rush Deception deck, I decided to put in 2x Surprise Delivery with the following reasoning - the 6 damage that it does is almost unstoppable, and could also potentially stop Light opponents from flooding the board even more. I didn't think of how bad it was when you weren't close to dealing lethal to the opponent. And against Light opponents, there was a higher chance that they flooded the board even before I got to play Surprise Delivery, rendering this card to be even more useless.
Maybe it shouldn't come as a surprise that Assasin's Aim doesn't work with Shadow of Lethenon, Switch Duelist, and Armor Lurker. I had removed this in an earlier version of the deck but decided to put it back in because... it's 3 damage and gave hidden. It usually felt like a dead card.
Handsome Duelist looks good on paper, but it feels pretty bad to play in practice. At 5 mana, it can't be played alongside anything else most of the time, and its paltry 3 health makes it vulnerable to the likes of Canopy Barrage, Shaped Blast, or just a simple Guild Enforcer standing in its way.
Performance and Matchmaking Breakdown
Starting Rank: Mythic
Wins: 10/25
Reward Packs: 2x Core Rare, 2x Core Epic, 3x DO Rare, 1x DO Epic
Theoretical pack value based on current pack prices: $14.46
| Opponent God | Deck Archetype | Score (Wins / Total Games) |
|---|---|---|
| Nature | Amazon Nature | 0 / 1 |
| Midrange Nature | 1 / 1 | |
| Regen Nature | 0 / 1 | |
| War | Aggro War | 2 / 3 |
| Magic | Control Magic | 1 / 1 |
| Death | Zombie Death | 0 / 3 |
| Deception | Hidden Rush Deception | 0 / 1 |
| Light | Midrange Light | 3 / 5 |
| Aggro Light | 0 / 2 | |
| Control Light | 1 / 1 | |
| Total | 8 / 19 |
I actually only played 19 games with this deck and got the remaining 2/6 wins with other decks. The performance is... not great. Light decks are really oppressive because they can deal more damage than this deck can, forcing this deck to become the control deck rather than the aggressive deck, especially if they go first. There's also not very much that this deck can do against them since Umber Arrow is unlikely to do a 2-for-1 given how Light creatures tend to have high health.
The other really bad matchup is Zombie Death. Well, I should have seen this coming from a mile away but I didn't. Since this deck doesn't try to control the board, trying to use the Hidden mechanic to win quickly and decisively, Zombies' leech basically stops this plan in its tracks. There's just no way to do enough damage to secure the win before the Zombies kill me instead.
Frustrating performance for sure, but I guess this is one way of knowing how good (or in this case, bad) a deck is.
Historical Performance
It kinda sucks losing more than half my matches, but this is also a learning experience. As much as I don't want to always be a meta slave, there are just certain times where some decks perform poorly and I have to accept that if I choose to play such a deck. I know I'm still pretty bad at piloting Deception decks in general, but I hope that I'll be able to pilot them better after some practice. For next week though, I'll be switching to a more meta deck since I don't really have that much time to experiment with more avant grade decks.
Past 10 Weekend Ranked posts and performance in order of recency:
| Time Period | Deck | Score (Wins / Total Games) | Starting Rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 2022 W1 | Hidden Rush Deception/Mixed | 10 / 25 | Mythic |
| Mar 2022 W4 | Aggro Nature | 15 / 25 | Mythic |
| Mar 2022 W3 | Aether Magic | 16 / 25 | Mythic |
| Mar 2022 W2 | Card Draw Magic | 22 / 25 | Mythic |
| Mar 2022 W1 | Control Nature | 19 / 25 | Mythic |
| Feb 2022 W4 | Control Nature | 19 / 25 | Mythic |
| Feb 2022 W3 | Tempo Magic | 18 / 25 | Mythic |
| Feb 2022 W2 | Tempo Magic | 19 / 25 | Mythic |
| Feb 2022 W1 | Tempo Magic | 18 / 25 | Mythic |
| Jan 2022 W5 | Tempo Magic | 19 / 25 | Mythic |
Concluding Thoughts
Although I didn't perform well this weekend, I'm not discouraged - this wasn't the first time that I've obtained bad results, and I'll work towards a more consistent and better-performing deck in the future. After all, I do like my packs!
Post Header image source: Gods Unchained Media Kit
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Some of the card images in this post are generated by GUListCreator, a tool I created for fast card list lookup and creation to write posts like this on Hive. Do check it out if you like to create content for Gods Unchained!