Hey all,
Chris Clay here, Game Director of Gods Unchained. It’s been a little over five months since the Divine Order expansion set launched, and it's time for another shake up of the meta. It’s coming, but this time in the form of the Core Set Refresh, with 70 new cards being added into the Core set, and a portion of the 180 existing Core cards being rebalanced.
A fresh new look
The overall purpose for the refresh falls into four key categories: consistency, clarity, competitiveness and fun. We’ve designed over 2,000 cards now and over that time we’ve improved a lot, and a big part of the refresh is to continue to improve the experience here across the board. We’ve gone through and cleaned up a whole bunch of the more needlessly wordy or complex cards so that they are consistent and more concise than what they were.
Competitiveness is an obvious one – ultimately, we want everyone to have access to a winning strategy and we’re confident that this refresh helps to accomplish that. Then the final purpose is possibly the most important one of all: fun. The general methodology of the design is that we wanted these cards to be cool and give players that “oh wow” moment – bringing excitement to the Core pack opening experience for longer term players and new players alike. Cleaning up cards that are clumsy, don’t work or are otherwise not fun helps us keep the fun in the game, which is ultimately the reason why we’re all here. In short, we’ve focused the changes on improving and buffing underutilized Core cards.
Leveling the playing field
This is a release we’re going to be watching with great interest as it’ll be the first time we’ve released new Core cards since the Forge was re-enabled on L2. This will provide an opportunity for new and existing players to be among the first to Forge these cards onto Immutable X, as well as provide us with additional cards to balance out the ever evolving GU meta. There are definitely some spicy new cards in the mix that we’ll need to watch closely balance wise once they’re in the wild, and we can’t wait to see how the meta evolves when these launch.
I know that pay to win has been an active discussion in the community, and the release of the Core Set Refresh is a continuation of our commitment to ensuring that F2P players can compete at top-levels of play. Positioning ourselves as a leader in mainstream accessibility as we work to share blockchain gaming with the wider gaming world.
Wen?
When is that exactly? Well, if you’ve been following some of our content creators closely, you may have seen a few of these already being teased. But you’ll have the full card set revealed on March 6 @ 5pm PST and then the full set going live on the beta realm March 7 @ 5pm PST (drop bears and historic flooding willing).
Future musings
Next week will also herald our first State of the Beta for the year. This will land later in the week, but we’re going to be doing things a little differently this time around. On top of the usual blog/reddit information dump, we’re going to host a stream shortly after the release to chat further about the content of the State of the Beta, looking at our goals and direction. If you have any topics you'd love covered, head over to the Reddit thread to let us know what interests you and we can look at including them in our discussion. There are some big announcements coming along shortly that we can’t wait to share with you.
On a final note: I’d also like to issue a challenge to the community. The first player to acquire a complete playable set of meteorite Core Set Refresh cards and tweet the results to @GodsUnchained will be given the opportunity to choose a character for me to cosplay in a future stream.
...no rats though. I’ve been there and boy was it too scary to repeat.
