I’ve written a preview, a first-day look, and made a calculator for the new Daily Play&Earn system already, but I feel like some of there are still some myths and questions out there regarding it. I hope to answer a couple of the most frequent ones here.
However, first and foremost I just want to say that if you’re a new player to Gods Unchained, you shouldn’t worry about how shiny your deck is at all. Play a bunch of games with different Gods and get a good feel/grasp of the game first, figure out which Gods/playstyles you like the most, try to climb as high a rank as you can by building the best deck you can, then worry about your shine. Having fun is the most important part because this is a game. There’s no point in investing in shiny cards if you aren’t going to use them in the future because you don’t like the God you chose, or even worse, the game.
If you’re at a level where you can start worrying about Daily P&E, just remember that the most important things are to have an All Meteorite deck at least, and be in the highest rank you can be, plus have a decent win rate. Those factors matter the most, not a few Shadow and/or Diamond cards here and there. But if you’ve stuck with me this far, let’s take a dive!
Let’s say you’ve been playing for awhile and got a decent stock of some Common Core plain card like Black Jaguar. You love playing Nature. You’ve already listened to some internet guy telling you to make sure you are using at least All Meteorite cards for your deck so you are already using two. Should you forge them and make some Shadow or maybe Gold versions? The answer is yes. In terms of payback period, or the time it takes for the cost of GODS in forging to recover itself from the Daily P&E gain, you’re looking at half a year if you’re an average player that wins ~5 games a day. Let’s define some terms here, as I’ve already described average. What I call an efficient player is one who stops playing after winning 3 games a day, just to utilize the full effect of the 2x bonus. Finally, I have the perfect player (who doesn’t exist) that wins 10 games per day all the time; this serves as the upper bound of this analysis. Below you will see the payback periods depending on the player, as well as what you’re quality/shininess you’re forging to (this assumes you’re forging to that shininess to replace a Meteorite card in your deck).
That seems like a long time to you? It could be, but just remember that most useful Common Core cards sell for way above their forging costs. Stuff like Canopy Barrage and Black Jaguar will sell for 5-6 times the forging costs at each quality level. So if you’re a player that would rather play with different decks than concentrate on card quality, sell them and buy Meteorite cards for your other decks.
One thing of note is that there aren’t different sections depending on your rank. Guess what? It doesn’t depend on your rank. But everyone says that Shine matters more in lower ranks!!! Well, as a percentage gain it does, since you’ll be getting less fragments from your Gameplay Modifier, but since it’s the same absolute gain in your Deck Modifier, your absolute GODS gain will remain the same.
What about all those Rare/Epic/Legendary Core plain cards that you’ve amassed? They should be better, right? Well, not exactly. In terms of payback period in P&E, they’re worst just because they cost that much more to forge, and they don’t give you any extra daily GODS over Commons. Here you can see their payback times:
Are they good to sell? Yea, most of the time they are. Just double check the prices before you do just in case. Do note that for higher shines, what’s listed might not be what people are willing to pay for it. Looking at the purchase/price history on say Tokentrove is a better indicator, and you can check the volume too.
You’ve been doing good and getting lots of expansion packs from the Weekend Events. Now you got a whole bunch of copies of some Commons and Epics (still not sure why they made Epics more common than Rares…). Should you be forging them? For Commons and Rares, it’s most likely a yes; the payback period is pretty low for them. Epics aren’t too bad neither. See below:
What about resale? Well that you would need to check the prices/volumes for the cards in question. A lot of the expansion higher shine cards don’t have much volume in terms of sales.
You can definitely do that. Although the individual percent gain is pretty small per card, there is still a breakeven calculation that can be made. Since I don’t know what the price of the card you are looking at is, I included a tab in my P&E calculator so you can figure it out for yourself. What I’ve done here is took a look at what the prices would be if you were an efficient player trying to make back the value in a year. See below (note that as the GODS price increases, your payback period decreases).
What this means is that if you bought a Diamond Card for $8.5, you’d make that much back in GODS gains over using a Meteorite card after playing for ~365 days winning 3x a day.
Of course, there are many variables at play to determine the numbers I’ve shown you, but assumptions have to be made to do these estimates. I’ll list some of them here, as well as other thoughts.
-All of the calculations are made with today’s Community Fragments, Total Daily GODS pools, and GODS price. Note the GODS price in the Buy tab of the calculator automatically pulls the current price
-For the different player profiles, namely the efficient and average, I estimated a winstreak pattern for the calculations
-This assumes that you will play 100% of your games with said card; if you made a Diamond Jag for example, but like playing 3 different Gods equally, multiply your payback period by 3. This is an issue I have had with this Daily P&E since its inception; it limits people to play their best and shiniest decks everyday and does not promote deck diversity/experimentation
-Remember, the payback calculations are for one card; stacking multiples doesn't change the payback calculations for each card, unless you're one card away from raising the minimum quality of your deck (ie. you have 29 cards Shadow and above and you are buy/forging a Shadow)
-The payback periods for Forging is GODS-price-agnostic, meaning it doesn’t matter what the price of GODS are as forging costs GODS and P&E rewards GODS. Only the Community and Daily GODS pools will affect it
-The payback periods here don’t take into consideration the value of the card; ie. the price you can sell it at. I’m not here to speculate on shiny card prices, or the value of GODS for that matter. Especially for Buying shiny cards, if you really think you can sell a card for the exact price you paid for it (taking fees into consideration), then effectively your payback period is 0. You can make either assumption here; card price stays the same, and all P&E increases are pure gain; or that GODS value stays the same, and after the payback period whatever value you have left on your card is pure gain. Of course, it’ll probably be a combination of both
-On that note, I will be making a tab that will let you compare different scenarios. It’ll let you compare 2 different total scenarios to calculate payback periods, which will make it easy to compare two decks of different shines (ie. upgrading a few cards to Gold, etc.) but also to take into consideration the GODs pool, Community pool, ranks, and winrates. You think you’ll be better off with an All Diamond deck playing in rank 7 than All Meteorite in Mythic? I’ll make it easy for you to check! Look forward to it this/next week
-Having fun is the #1 goal for most of us, so if you enjoy playing many decks/Gods then don’t worry too much about investing in higher shine for Daily P&E gains, unless the decks you like playing share useful Neutral cards
-High rank and win rates are still the most important; not only do they give you better P&E rewards, but also Weekend Ranked Packs
-Getting your best/most played deck(s) to All Meteorite is always the first shine priority
-If you have extra copies of a common/rare Expansion card that you use in your main deck(s), you should probably forge it
-If you have extra copies of a common Core card that you use in your main deck(s), you should forge it. Even if you don’t use it at some point, useful and staple common Core cards like the Magic Bolts or Black Jaguar usually sell for more than its forging costs
-If you’re truly about the gains and want to buy shine cards for P&E, there are payback calculations you can do with my calculator. If you really believe the price of the cards will be stable or increasing, go ahead and make your deck shine bright like a diamond