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Shine on: What is the shine meta?
Greetings everyone and welcome to another post about Gods Unchained. In this post we will be discussing Shine dp2e, how it effects the meta, and how it's changed over time. For a long time shining up cards was MOSTLY aesthetic and rank mattered the most. During this time a lot of bot farms were churning into each other at lower ranks. To combat this GU reduced earnings for the first 7 ranks and increased the value of having a shiney deck (I forget which was first but both were implemented around roughly if not the same time if I recall). They also cracked down on bots and it reduced overall bot activity throughout GU
The Good: It Thinned Bots
The reward pool at least (hopefully) is going moreso to real players than it was in the past before the dp2e changes. Floors of cards are inclined to be purchased and cards rented for dp2e, BUT as I've found in my experience what matters the most is how SHINEY your deck is compared to anything (even rank). And now many decks are opting for worse shiney cards in place of strong lower print options for better dp2e (my deck is among them). This meta shift has created a thinned competitive environment that was already deteriorating with a lack of leaderboard incentives etc.
The Bad: It Thinned Competition
The decks you encounter in ranked now can be a bit wonky or whaley or rented, but most of what you are seeing is shiney and or a tuned meta meteorite list. Nothing in between. It's easy to que up a meta list but these become expensive to have shiney or in some cases impossible to do so. This has effected what people run, the full diamond boost is serious business and some cards in the game CANNOT be in diamond for your list. The game has become much less competitive and is mostly about piloting shiney ANYTHING decks in solar gold+
A Perfect Medium? Who knows
This meta does give value to shiney cards which is an overall pro, but devaluing competition and the best decks rising to the top of the ranks is a huge con here. Also bots being removed from the picture is an overall good thing giving out the dp2e pool to real players, but now playing shiney decks over and over and over and over for dp2e is starting to be a bit of a burnout also. Maybe I should start renting? Who knows. I think there needs to be more incentives to be "the best" at the game on leaderboard, but it's very difficult to discern what should be there to incentivize players to achieve said positions. Weekend ranked rewards are work next to nothing (even for top 10 etc.) so dp2e is focused upon, and the shiniest deck you can get to at least tread water in solar gold and above. Nothing else matters. I have mixed feelings about how the meta is/works myself. I think there needs to be more competitive elements to the game etc. in general. But what do you all think? What do you like/what would you change? Let me know in the comments wherever you find this. I'll see you all on Eucos running shiney shiney shiney cards, regardless of the W/R.
Talking Tidbits: My Takeaway
I personally have become a bit burned out grinding out the same shiney deck everyday for weeks, even though I've "ROIed" or whatever my fun has been drained from my body as if by some vampiric force. Months of the same deck and being decentivized to play anything that isn't a diamond has definitely had a toll on the fun factor for me. I used to homebrew and play all kinds of crazy things and try to put them onto the leaderboard, there isn't a point for me to do that now and in fact would be less progression in game than what I'm currently doing. Daily 10 feels like a chore to get over with to start actually playing the game for fun, it always did but it certainly feels exacerbated these days. Day in day out, Shine shine shine. What do you folks think about it? Do you like it? Are you also feeling the burn?
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Hi! This is the relevant link
https://content.godsunchained.com/blog/article/dpe-restructuring-breakdown
My middle ground would be to count any shiny cards in the collection. I'd say a shiny cards in the deck counts 1x and a shiny card in your collection, from the God's domain counts 0.2x, so you'd need 5 not in deck to count as 1 in the deck. This still gives value to shiny cards while allowing people more freedom and not punishing people for optimizing shine instead of competitiveness.
I didn't buy Diamond cards on purpose for DPE, so I don't feel obligated to play the same deck all the time. So I change decks frequently and I try to find what is working for me at different times. Being able to rent helps a lot, although now one needs to be careful and do the math on the renting costs. Playing Formats also helps a lot with diversity and I see people playing with shiny cards there as well.
Also could you please put a source link of the gifs in the posts as well? Unless you made them yourself :P
The gifs are all free to use via tenor and linked in the gif themselves merely right click for the link location. There is a reason it is enabled within the peakd keyboard friend. They are actually just hyperlinks.
Seriously though, joking aside all gifs are linked in and of themselves and free to use and filtered into the peakd keyboard application for this exact purpose. Appreciate the zeal, but that's all kosher. There is an article on it published a while back when the "GIF" part of the keyboard came out.
The gif itself appears like this and is actually linked when posted via the keyboard to not require double sourcing. It's by design.
Just clearing that up, they are linked by default to the image source itself. Tenor is a public image repository with various image sources that allow free use. Appreciate the shine meta link, but I'm pretty sure if I use the peakd keyboard gifs they are kosher. It was the whole reason I was using them lol, if you want me to format it to double link w/text I can do that it's no biggy or if sources are just getting cracked down upon harder I added them.
I've only had a short time when I was winning even in leagues below 7. But it seems that the distribution of shards is better now. Anyway, I still only have Meteorites and Shadows cards.