Our new lead Justin (the Riot hire), did an awesome AMA a few days ago. Firstly, it was his Saturday AM. That was a great way to signal a willingness to put in extra work and that he cares about the game. He answered every single question we asked, which was also a positive sign. Going through the entire AMA is for a different post, but one of the things that happened was a commitment to ship daily play & earn by August 30th.
Having a hard date in and of itself signals a new leaf turned over at Immutable. Let's hope they meet the deadline, but assuming they do, it's time to start strategizing.
The definitive source on P&E
The critical info we know about P&E is from here:
https://blog.godsunchained.com/2022/06/08/daily-play-earn-update-reward-calculations/
(All charts/graphs from here.)
There is a lot to digest, but I'm going to keep things qualitative so it's easier.
The Big Question
The blog post talks a lot about X% "more" for having this or Y% "more" for doing that. No where in there does it give an inkling of how much you might actually earn a day. Is the baseline 1 $GOD? 5? 10? OK definitely not 10, but we don't know what it's going to be. This is part of the reason to keep this qualitative. No one should waste too much time before knowing if this is going to be worth anything or not.
The basics
- 10 games each day count towards P&E
- 1st 3 wins give a bonus
- More rewards at higher rank
- More rewards for shiny cards
- A little more reward for win streaks
- Winning earns fragments that are converted to $GODS based on your % of total fragments earned that day
3 win bonus
This is a critical piece of info that is going to dictate a lot of our strategy. Unfortunately, they don't give any info on how much of a bonus you get on the first 3 wins. However, we know that the mechanic is to allow people with less time to play to still get a decent chunk of the rewards. This lets us dial in some guesses on bonus percentage.
For example:
A 100% bonus means that the first 3 wins count as 6 wins (all else equal). In this case, a perfect day (winning 10 actual games), would give fragments equivalent to 13 wins.
If the same person won only 3 games, they would get fragments equal to 6 wins. In other words, a 1st-win bonus of 100% would give 3 wins 46% of the reward compared to a perfect run. For more normal performance (e.g. 5-6 wins out of 10 games), your first 3 wins are effectively all that matter. The same is mostly still true even if the bonus is lower (e.g. 50%).
Yes, I'm hand-waiving away win streaks, but the point here is that our strategy needs to revolve around maximizing these 3 wins. In short, using a deck with a lower win-rate but higher shine is likely the better move. Even 40% win rate decks (if you can play 10 games) are probably better than 60% wins with meta decks.
Shine
Minimum Shine
Let's get this first bit out of the way: bonuses for minimum shine. In short, the graphs below are telling you one thing: don't have any plain cards in your deck. Having even 1 plain card is going to be a big hit to your earnings (15% bonus down to ~1% bonus). The bonuses for having all shadow or gold are much less, so not as important.
Raw Shine Bonus
The value of card Quality progresses in the same way as the Shine Fusing requirements in the Forge. If a Meteorite card is worth 1 point, then a Shadow card is worth 5 points, a Gold card is worth 25, and a Diamond is worth 125.
A diamond is worth 25 shadows.
That's huge. Don't waste your money buying shadow meta cards. Be me and grab some cheap neutral diamonds. I made a post way back in December. At the time, I was buying neutral golds. Diamonds are a lot more expensive, so I didn't go quite as crazy, but here's what I picked up in diamond:
(5 golds = 1 diamond)
- Neutral: all gods can use them
- 1 mana: the difference between "great" and "OK" 1 mana cards is relatively small compared to 4+ mana cards. But the diamond bonus is the same.
Skeletal Hoplite is actually a great card. It's expensive, but I had picked up a bunch of golds back in December for dirt cheap (in terms of ETH), so I just topped up enough golds to have 1 diamond and 1 gold. A diamond skeletal hoplite will go in every $GODS farming deck no question. It's ideal in zombie decks, solid in light aggro, etc.
Planetar is only "good", but again the difference between good and great is small. Planetar can highroll a zombie, will usually give you 6 favor, and late game might be the 3 damage to the face you need to win. Not bad. Blessed is probably worth 0.5 mana on its own, so the card has value.
In my mind, I can run an otherwise meta deck, but swap out my one drops for 3 diamonds, which is 75(!) shadow cards worth of points. I won't feel the need to sacrifice higher mana slots to get golds in. If my gold Guild Enforcers work well in my deck then great! I just don't have to force them into every deck (I probably still will at first to see how it goes).
Rank
This graph raises more questions than it answers. For instance, it could imply that you only get 25% rewards in rank 8, which would be a brutal penalty. Alternatively, it could be a 25% bonus in rank 8. (If you know definitively which, drop a comment.)
Two things make me think it's a percentage bonus:
- Only getting 25% rewards in rank 8 is a brutal penalty and would make the game sweatier than ever.
- Being in rank 12 doesn't convey a 1.00 on this chart. Doesn't make sense for mythic players to have a 90% penalty.
Based on this, I think it is likely that very shiny decks in rank 9-10 could out-earn meteorite meta decks in Mythic. This also means that those ranks are likely to contain a higher percentage of off-meta / high-shine decks, which will make for fun games and higher-than-expected win percentages.
Impact on Weekend Ranked
We know that $GODS rewards will be removed from Weekend Ranked once mythic comes out. Right now, a single win in mythic during weekend ranked grants enough $GODS to buy most Mortal Judgement legendaries. When that is gone, the incentives for weekend ranked will drop drastically. People like me (who don't play much weekend ranked anyway), might fall out of mythic never to return and instead focus on daily P&E. Folks with impressive card collections in high shine would more likely want to stay in mythic to maximize rewards from both P&E and Weekend Ranked.
It will be interesting to see what happens as people respond to changing incentives. Fewer players in Mythic means a slower inflation rate for expansion set cards. This in turn means they might appreciate in price, which might draw people back to weekend ranked! A new equilibrium will be found, but one thing is for sure: it won't be what it is now where everyone has to grind up as high as possible to get decent rewards.
Conclusion
I don't claim to know if any of this strategizing will pay off. Maybe we wind up getting like 2 $GODS a day, card prices crash, and I'm big sad. However, I've done my best to min/max rewards while not investing too much $$ into cards or too much time into spreadsheets.
My outlook on the game has improved thanks to new leadership. Looking forward to seeing what happens!
Thanks for sharing this, I had looked into those 2 cards, I went as far as mana 3 and tbh I need to wait and see the baseline, DO I think will take a long time to have that ROI, I think I lost that boat, so I will focus on shadow ones, but I have been buying some MJ cards like City Sniper, I feel that one can make that cut for a cheap value. and who knows maybe they buff something meanwhile worth making a diamond or 2. It will always come down to how many GODS we can actually earn every day.
Couldn't resist to the prices a few days ago, end up buying a bunch.
Also went for "Amazon Spellcatcher" is a 2 mana card, but the blessed and ward kind helps with that extra mana.
end up buying enough meteorites and shadows of those 3 to get 2 golds of each 😄
Yep. I have spellcatchers in gold, too.
Hopefully all the strategies that have been compiled run smoothly @kstreet 😁
Awesome read and great to find a fellow GU fan on the Hive blockchain
Waiting was long and was turning into depression, honestly. Glad to know it might begin in a month.
My strategy was to create one full shadow+ deck with the potential, and I have done it for Deception. I can fuse some golds but I don't hurry. For example, I don't like the idea of fusing a pile of meteorites into 2 gold Patient Pickpockets (to get extra 0.0001% daily $GODS?) instead of holding and selling them when they cost 1$ each.
Also, I have many cards to fuse for Heirloom Death but I can't get a full shadow deck for my Anubians (I hardly could afford 2 meteorite Untold Greed). So, I decided to save $GODS this time. Your strategy can be an answer in such cases, maybe I can collect cards for fusing 2 diamond Dead Body Guards which are playable, maybe 2 more other diamonds.
Anyway, no fusing until I know all the details.
Yep, I actually haven't done any fusing either - and for the same reason. I definitely think tossing a diamond dead body guard into anubian is a smart play. My only concern about that is the possibility of a change to a single card (Land of the Dead) that drastically lowers the win rate of anubians. People hate playing against it and are constantly calling for nerfs.
Right. A lot of complainers on Reddit while the archetype (without the most expensive cards like Sulphuric Rain, Ragnarok, and Untold Greed) isn't that super strong against all these aggro decks and any sort of Deception. If devs nerf Land of the Dead, some good money of mine will be locked in 2 Untold Greed and 2 Skull Scepter. So, this is a thing to think about. Maybe I should sell and buy something that is less vulnerable to potential nerfs.
I believe that this will bring back a lot of people who have dumbed the game! I don't know why the delay was so long but I'm definitely looking forward to that! Also, I really liked your view on all of that! Thanks for sharing mate!
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I wrote a little about it back then: https://hive.blog/hive-173286/@phoenixskye/preview-of-daily-pay-and-earn-percentages-according-to-rank-and-deck-quality
Basically 3 Diamonds + 27 Meteorite is better than 30 Shadow. However, even at that point, you're just only 4% more than a 30 Meteorite deck; the most important thing is staying in Mythic.
I just re-read your post. You might be right about the impact of ranked. My hope is that the impact of rank is not as dramatic. There won't be any way to know, but if I was designing a system, I'd more or less equally weight shine and rank. That way, mediocre players with high shine could earn similarly to star players with low shine.
Even if your interpretation is correct, I think 2-3 decent 1 drop diamonds is still probably the way to go to keep your win % as high as possible.
Fun to speculate.
Well, technically it is weighted equally as rank and shine carry the same weight; a full Diamond deck playing at the lowest rank gets more or less Gods than a full meteorite at Mythic
I have no idea how much it will give us to have better quality of cards.
I let them surprise me. Maybe im gonna buy some new stuff later after it got released.
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