The Gods Unchained Marketplace is a unique and elusive beast with many faces, offering up surprises every week as you delve into the data.
The last two weeks featured an interesting back-and-forth with some refreshing stabilization that's been previously hard to come by, along with some familiar faces populating a larger part of the top twenty than ever before.
Our featured writer, Luci Kelemen, guides us through the latest analysis...
Topline observations
- Week 11: just like the old days
- The staying power of strong Commons
- A semblance of stability?
Week 11: just like the old days
The Week 11 numbers bore a surprising resemblance to the early days of the Marketplace. There's been a range of Legendary creatures in the weekly top 20 lists since the beginning, but the rarity of the top sellers saw a decline as the weeks went on. Well, many old friends have made a return appearance this time around, with the list featuring certain cards that haven’t been on the charts for over a month and a half.
Tyr, The Just was last seen on the second week of trading, and made a triumphant return at #2 (behind Charm, a rare which has not been featured previously) and Raving Fan at #3, a card that was last featured in the Week 4 edition of this column. All three of these cards subsequently fell off the list on Week 12, suggesting this was just a temporary spike of interest on the part of the purchasers.
Official Marketplace Top 20 Cards - Week 11
Deathsworn Raider was also missing in action for a long time, making a return from the Week 5 list, but unlike the previous three entrants, it managed to stick around for the following week. Pyramid Warden remained #5 from last time out and came in at #7 on Week 14, followed by a newcomer in the form of Nullmaw. In fact, this marks the second time in Marketplace history where only three of the top ten on these weekly lists were cards previously featured. Golden Harpe rose by 11 places, only to fall out of the top 20 altogether on the following week, with Gentle Monk in #8 also making a long-awaited, if temporary return. Behind High Thaumaturge in #9 is Deathwish Thanetar, another newcomer in this column.
Other notable returning cards in Week 12 are Black Rhino (#13, last seen Week 8), Agrodor Protector (#16, previously seen on the opening week and Week 3), Hallowed Keeper (#17, also last seen on Week 8) and Dangerous Ritual. Like Agrodor Protector, this spell was also more prevalent in the early weeks of trading, but it more than made up for it here, shooting all the way up to #1 on Week 12.
The staying power of strong Commons
My favorite Marketplace subplot so far was the Nimble Pixie phenomenon, as the card (quite fittingly considering its name) kept up with all the undercurrents while everyone else fell off, staying on the top 20 lists for the first three consecutive weeks and peaking at #2 while no other card managed to keep up. Though it hasn’t been anywhere near as consistent in trading performance since, there's two similar cards that have made regular appearances.
Both Rolling Watcher and Pyramid Warden have become reliable members of the weekly top 20 club, no doubt owing to the fact that they are useful neutral tempo tools with viability across multiple faster archetypes. In fact, Pyramid Warden was present on all but one of our weekly lists with the exception of Week 2, when seemingly everyone was looking for a reliable response to Rune Mage. However, the consistent volume of trading doesn’t seem to have correlated with a steady increase in card value so far, which is likely as expected with lower-rarity cards.
It will be interesting to watch the performance of these cards (and others with similar characteristics printed in the future) as the card pool keeps expanding and the comparative power level inevitably rises somewhat. This isn’t even a question of power creep: with further options available, the bar becomes harder to clear especially when sometimes highly specialized options are printed for certain archetypes.
Week 12: A semblance of stability?
One of the benefits of turning this column into a biweekly one is that we won’t go completely overboard trying to explain away developments like the ones we’ve seen for Week 11, for they mostly turned out to be temporary. Though the rise of Dangerous Ritual and Raze Imp (debuting at #15 on Week 11 and reaching #3 after that) have their origins in the first week’s worth of data, the total turnover rate remained relatively high with thirteen of the twenty cards replaced by their compatriots between the analyzed period.
However, most of them were replaced by familiar faces. In fact, despite the usual high rate of fluctuation, this marked the lowest rate of new entries to the top twenty list, with just seven previously unseen cards overall.
Official Marketplace Top 20 Cards - Week 12
Fallen Aether showed up at #2, sandwiched between the aforementioned duo, followed by Cyrene’s Blessing. Behind them, two other cards returning from the early days of trading: Sleep Dart and Jason, Medea’s Muse. Greed Banestrider is #7, followed by… you probably guessed it - Pyramid Warden. Its partner in crime and consistency, Rolling Watcher is back again, now at #19.
Another measurement of stability was the fact that certain cards actually managed to keep their identical position in the Top 20 rankings, with Pyramid Warden staying at #5 for two weeks in a row and Hallowed Keeper holding #17 on both Week 11 and 12. It remains to be seen whether this will continue on going forward – and by the same token, whether the introduction of the Sanctum and Favor system will have a large enough effect on the metagame to encourage players to seek out previously unpopular cards.
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