Card collecting incentives in Gods Unchained

Introduction

This post is about ideas that would drive more players towards buying and holding cards - towards growing and holding a collection. It's part of a series of posts that collect ideas for game features that have yet to be implemented and I believe would be very beneficial to the game.

The current situation is that many players just keep the few cards they play with - often just 1 deck - and rotate them as the meta changes. And all the while they sell everything else they get. On top of this there are no incentives or rewards to work towards completing full sets and no verifiable way to proudly show your peers the impressiveness of your collection.

The consequence of this is that very few cards actually hold their initial value; premium pack expected value (the value of the cards inside) becomes much less than the actual pack price; any cards obtained for free as rewards feel worthless; the balance between buying and selling $GODS tokens shifts towards selling; the earning potential from DP&E is diminished; the studio collects lower fees from the secondary market trades.

Getting more cards out of circulation would go a long way towards keeping the card prices more inline with their expected value from pack purchases. Arguably this would drive pack sales, as the economic incentive would actually work together with the other incentives that drive pack sales, instead of working against them. Having more cards available in one’s collection would also potentially incentivize players to try out different decklists, which is an obvious positive for the fun and long-term playability of the game.

One basic principle around any collection rewards is that it shouldn’t be possible to rent or get cards temporarily from friends to fulfill requirements. This would just defeat the purpose of designing these incentives. So the eligibility would need to be checked on a regular basis and the most benefits would only be awarded if the conditions are met on a long-term basis.

Another basic principle in my mind is that most rewards should scale with collection size. I understand the argument some people make that the rewards should only apply to full sets, but this rule would have the perverse effect of discouraging many players because they would feel like those benefits or rewards would be forever out of reach or take too long to achieve. If the rewards increase with the collection size, players would feel a sense of progression and see their collection efforts rewarded along the way. Even if the rewards don’t scale linearly and a full collection yields much better rewards than a partial collection, this principle would still have a positive contribution to the desired behavior of holding an ever increasing collection of cards.

For a list of possible rewards, see this other post.

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Low print cards

Some of these rewards could also be applied to reward owning low print cards. For example, if you own 1 of 34 Meteorite Rat of Destruction, you have a pretty rare card in your collection. It would be nice if some sort of reward would be generated regularly in function of the print rarity of the cards. It could be for example tickets to tournaments or premium game modes. Could also be better chances of winning a prize in a raffle. The lower the print the more frequent that card is able to generate something of value for the owner.

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Displayable titles and cosmetics

The very first thing is to actually fix the broken legacy title system from the Genesis and Trial days, and update it to include all other sets released afterwards.

• Gain account-bound (ie, non-NFT) cosmetics and perks for developing a collection of each set. The bulk of the benefits could be skewed towards a full set or close to that, but the game would still show the effects and some progression benefits for incomplete sets.

• Bonus tiers for full sets of quality above Meteorite (so if you have all MJ cards in Gold or better for example you get something extra). Again, these perks would be dynamic and become disabled if the player sells cards and no longer fulfills the requisites.

• For every certain number of unique cards (meaning prototypes) in the collection, the owner would unlock an increasingly elaborate board and / or trinket per set. These items would be account bound, non-NFT (non-tradeable) that upgrade and downgrade dynamically as the user buys or sells cards.

The titles could be displayed to other players in the game when starting a match and eventually also at the end, if a match statistics screen is ever implemented. They could also be part of the player’s metadata so they could be displayed by third-party websites like GU Decks.

Some titles could indicate that the player owns full sets. Other milestones are also interesting to show to others like total number of victories, how many times the player reached top 10 in Weekend Ranked or any other metric of relevance.

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Tradeable bonuses

• Each owned full set yields a ticket every number of days / weeks to enter certain premium game modes. The tickets would be sellable on the secondary market. The number of tickets and the interval would depend on the relative cost of the set

• For every x hundred cards in the collection, boost rewards in game modes by a certain % and / or increase the % chance of getting rarer rewards

• For every x hundred cards in the collection, gain an extra ticket to play a certain game mode every number of days / weeks

• Positive collection growth (as in new unique cards / prototypes) each week enables perks during the following week:

  • $GODS % increase in DP&E from a separate pool,

  • increased % chance at rare drops from game modes,

  • access to a lottery that distributes shiny cards purchased by the GU team, or some other reward (I mean players with a full collection should be able afford to buy any card they want anyway, they don't need these crumbs 😛)

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Game currency bonuses

The bonuses could tie to a wider set of game rewards shared across other aspects of the game. They could be for example:

• a % boost to any of the in-game currencies, including experience.

• a rebate when forging cards that belong to a set that is complete or nearly complete

• bigger bonus when completing the Gauntlet of the Gods

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Gacha boxes

This would be a new reward item. When you win a match the game calculates the chance of getting a gacha box that can contain one or more of exclusive cosmetics, very rare card variants, premium game mode tickets, etc.

The chance of getting one of these gacha boxes would be very low with a small collection and increases linearly with the shine and size of the collection. To incentivize shinning up cards, the calculation could only consider cards of Shadow quality and above.

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Raffles

Organize raffle events where owning

• low print cards

• higher shine cards

• larger collections and full sets

would increase the chances of winning prizes in the raffle.

The raffles could distribute alternate art cards, new Mythic cards, any low print cosmetics, card packs, etc.

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Locking cards as entry ticket to a premium game mode

I would like to see a way of paying for a premium game mode consisting of temporarily locking cards as a means of payment: when a player locks a Diamond card they get one ticket.

Locking cards means those cards cannot be used to obtain another ticket for a certain time period - 2 weeks for example. If the player wants to access that game mode again before the locking period ends, they'd have to lock another card.

If the player runs out of Diamond cards, they can batch lock other cards in their collection at the same rate as required for forging. So for example 5 Gold cards would also yield one ticket and those 5 cards would be also locked for 2 weeks. Following this principle, one could also lock for example 125 Meteorite cards or any other combination of shines that would satisfy the requirement of obtaining a Diamond card.

This means that to play this game mode regularly, each player would have to own enough cards to satisfy their play rate, so a very active player would require a very large collection to avoid being locked out.

The card lock status ideally would need be available not only in the game client but also in renting platforms. Another solution would be to only consider as valid entries cards that have been in the player's wallet address for a minimum time period.

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Printalis Card Moth

A cousin species of the Choralis Rune Moth, the Printalis Card Moth is attracted to Gods Unchained cards. Each player would get one, as they naturally appear wherever a large collection of cards exist. They enjoy the beautiful art in each card and a diverse collection would raise their printing powers and inspiration.

The Printalis gets inspiration from the art in the collection. When it reaches an inspiration threshold, they become able to print a new card by themselves. When this happens, and the player provides a blank card that could be obtained for example

• purchased from the GU store
• earned from staking a certain amount of $GODS every number of weeks
• in achievement chests, if this ever gets implemented
• game mode rewards
• in gacha boxes from collection rewards (see above)

The Printalis would then take ink dust into its wings, fly over to the blank card and gently press their wings against the blank canvas, leaving a new print and creating an art variant of an existing card. There could be an animation depicting this, akin to the pack opening animation. This process would require signing a transaction and burning the blank.

This means the game would need to commission art variants for every card in the game. This is probably going to be a sticky point, but if this idea ever gets taken seriously I hope some more modest solution could be found.

There would be a few general rules:

• The card would be randomly chosen from an existing prototype in your collection - you wouldn’t be able to print variants of cards you don’t own.

• Owning full sets would significantly increase the rate at which Printalis would be able to print a new variant from that set. I would tune this to the point where this process is much faster for full collections.

• Owning more copies of the same card wouldn’t affect the process, but owning more shiny cards would increase the chance of printing a higher quality variant, adjusted to the the amount of cards in each tier you own.

• You would need to be active in the game for the process to move forward, similar to the staking rules.

This random card choice happens if you let the Printalis hang around your collection freely. However, you can also direct it to focus on specific cards. There would be different possibilities:

• Have your Printalis focus on a single card for a very long period of time (say 1 year), and it will be able to create a guaranteed technical copy of that card with alternate art. This would be a slow but sure way to print new copies of expensive cards, for example from the Genesis set (could they be copied by the owner with the current rules?...)

• Have your Printalis focus on a complete set for a number of weeks (longer than completely random choice) and you would be able guarantee a print from a random card from that set.

• Have your Printalis focus on your complete Welcome Set of Meteorite quality or above for a number of days and you will be able to claim a random Welcome card of the quality tier above the lowest completed you own (for example if you own a full Shadow set you can mint 1 Gold card).

So there would be a get this / lose that choice dynamic here. And there would also be a choice to guarantee something more specific in exchange for fewer new printed cards over time. I think these kinds of choices can be a fun game on their own and many people would enjoy making these sort of strategic decisions. This would also increase the utility of shiny cards, especially if the new cards with alternate art become popular and demand a higher price.

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Play with specific cards for daily objectives

Another idea tied to daily objectives would be to offer rewards for winning with specific cards. The list of cards would change randomly but exclude popular, meta cards. It could also offer better rewards if the player is able to win with a larger set of random cards. The rewards could also scale with the quality of the cards. This would mean the winning a game with a few unpopular cards with high shine would yield better rewards.

Since the cards change randomly each day and the rewards would be tied to the card quality as well, this would incentivize players to keep a large collection of cards and even shine up those less popular cards - if the rewards would be interesting enough.

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Renting

Another easy way to return value to collectors is to make it easy for them to rent cards they don't use regularly. We currently have LootRush, but it requires owners to surrender ownership of the cards to the LootRush wallet address while renting is active. I don't think this is reasonable in a world where so many web3 projects fail and are susceptible to hacking and theft even with good security measures in place. It's also a backwards system where other blockchains (Hive) or L2 solutions (zkEVM) facilitate trustless renting via smart contracts.

So what I think could be done is the GU client itself would enable renting without actually any ownership transfer, simply hide a rented card in the lender's account and make it visible in the renter account, via web2 database magic. It's already possible for Content Creators to have access to plain cards, and a similar solution is probably used in dev accounts.

I wouldn't be surprised if such a solution raises tax problems for the studio, but I don't know anything about that and therefore I cannot comment on that or other legal roadblocks. I do think though that a migration from the current L2 technology to another that supports smart contracts would enable third-parties to develop platforms that enable trustless renting between players, without a centralized entity enabling the renting to work.