God's Unchained - 2021 Year-end-review

Hi friends and GU fans,

It has been a while since the last time I wrote anything. I promised myself I will write more often, but sometimes the hardest thing to do is to keep the promises we make to ourselves. Anyways, here I am trying to write something good before the end of the year. I hope you find value in everything bellow and please share and follow.

2021 has been an awesome year and I thought to myself what could be a better way to end the year than with a quick recap of everything that has happened in 2021 so far and how it changed God's Unchained forever for all of us.

For the past year there was an endless rollout of updates, bug fixes and game changes. New game mechanics were added which made the game more diverse and complex to play. We saw a ton of issues getting resolved on a weekly basis by the ever expanding and constantly growing GU team. Thank you all for all your hard work and contributions and for creating the best TCG game to have ever existed!

In early January this year we had a big announcement by the Game Director - Chris Clay. It was in regard to all the planed future development of the game. There were a lot of ideas thrown in there and the game was still in it's early stages.

I am not sure what is still on that list and shifted for 2022 and what is taken out completely, but I do think that it is an interesting read and can give us a glimpse of possible future developments in the game. You can read it here. Then, following the time line ...

First God Power Makeover Announcement - This was the time when changes became more prevalent. The game was slowly morphing into the GU you are all familiar today. Around this time I had to rework most of my decks. Old strategies didn't work anymore with the new changes. The new meta was emerging. TST team were dominating weekend ranked at that time with [TST]Mirrage88 being in top 3 players every other week. Ramp Magic was dominating the meta at the time, but not for long. Changes were about to be made.
After this we saw few game updates followed by The First P2E GodsUnchained Event. Things were a bit different back then, rewards were in ETH and you had to complete certain tasks in order to win $20 in ETH. This was the first time we as a community experienced growth and influx of new players. Suddenly, it was hard to match against the same player 2 times in a row. I might be slightly off with the numbers, but I believe that prior to this event we had around 3000-4000 players on Weekend Ranked Event. Someone correct me in the comments if numbers are off.
We had more game updates and changes for whatever was the issue at the time, then we got The ImmutableX rollout announcement in early March. After that? - More game updates including some god power changes... again.Then we had a refreshing update on the current state of the beta by the Game Director - ImmutableClay😃. Honestly, if you would like to be ahead of the curve, give the man a follow on reddit. At the end of March we also saw the first Sanctum Makeover and change of the cards you could draw when using it. There were still a lot of big creatures in there including Ironclad Minotaur and Dragon of the First Pillar.
In April and May we saw early access to ImmutableX. It wasn't that long ago when the only thing you could buy on ImmutableX was Gods Unchained cards. It is amazing to see the growth this space has seen ever since. Now you can look up 100+ projects on IMX and the numbers are growing weekly.
GU was holding steady numbers of weekly players. The question "Wen Forge?" was dominanting the GodsUnchained general chatroom. Things were quiet for a while and we did not hear much from the team. Two months went by with a lot of bug fixes, patches and balance updates to the core set. The game had a lot of connectivity issues and soft-locks at the time. We are all happy those times are gone and mostly forgotten! Trial of The Gods was officially sold out 100% on 05/05/2021.
June came along with an article on the mechanics of ending your turn. Interesting read for all the new players! This was shortly followed by another update from the Game Director. In June we also had our first glimpse of Divine Order as well. Around the end of the month, $GODS token was announced. Then we had another game update followed by the announcement of the Mythic Draw. Probably, the last mythic draw ever to be drawn. (After TOTG, the mythic draw was implemented as a percentage based chance to pull the Mythic Card out of a pack). The Mythic card was won by FlexyFlexy on July20th, and here is the interview with the winner. I was lucky enough to match him twice in mythic and play against him while he played the Mythic card. The Citadel of the GODS is an amazing card which changes the game completely and it should be banned from any competitive play. You just can't lose, if you play your card right! If you want to see the Mythic Card in play, check it out here. The one and only CopperPitch will show you how to play against it! Give him a follow if you want to learn more about the game. More updates and more changes were announced for core cards and the sanctum (This was the last time cards in the sanctum were replaced and Sanctum changed). This was followed by another game update and followed by the $IMX airdrop announcement.
In early August the PTR Realm was announced. What is PTR you may ask? It's the Public Test Realm. Here you can see all the new potential changes and balance updates which may or may not be implemented after the testing is complete. If you would like to learn more and be able to participate in early testing of card nerfs, buffs, new cards, new sets. Follow everything in #announcements and look for PTR announcements in particular. If you want to learn more - click here. At the end of August we got a sneak peek into DivineOrder card set. Some cards were revealed, which hyped everyone and got us all excited about the upcoming set. Could you imagine the thousands of new card combos and possible decks? Later updates were devoted to Gods Unchained Lore (series of stories about all the champions). If you like reading - Selena, Orfeo,Valka,Lysander, Pallas, Neferu.

At the end of August one of the biggest changes in the game was implemented. We saw the number of God Powers decrease from 4 to 3. There were mixed feelings about it at the time, but it was the right thing to do. If you want to read more on the subject ...

End of September Divine Order Sale was live. Everyone who played the months prior to Divine Order (DO), received the packs they won from the Weekend Ranked event before the packs sale was live. The most dedicated players and everyone who played the game got rewarded with all the packs they have been winning in the months prior. Happiness splashed all over the chatroom, nobody said " Wen Forge?" for 3 whole hours. Some people opened more than 50 packs at the time. At this point there were around 9,000 people on the Weekend Ranked event.

The new meta was a mess in the beginning. War was not only dominating everything, War was obliterating everyone and everything standing in it's way. People were shedding tears as big as boulders and were emotionally disbalanced for days. There were rumors some never recovered from War's mayhem. It was intense for about couple of weeks and everyone in the chat was quite angry. People were truly desperate. Some started doing hunger strikes and tying themselves to trees, others just gave up Gods Unchained for days!!! The GU team listened, everything was resolved in couple of weeks. Here is a picture I took back in the days.... about 3 months ago.... to immortalize this event for the future generations. Just mesmerizing!

I got so inspired at the time by all the emotions floating in the air and bouncing around, I created my first meme Please, don't judge!

It was interesting times and really if you think about it, it wasn't that long ago. For some reason in Gods Unchained time, it feels like decades have passed.

Right after we had some good news about $GODS token's IDO on CoinList and then followed by an announcement for $GODS listing on OKeX. This was the first major exchange listing which was shortly followed by many others. Couple of weeks later we saw Thunder Caller and Rolling Thunder nerfs. Few other war cards got changed as well and the game was competitive again. The chat got quiet again, people got back to grinding games.

Few more updates and balance patches after, then blessings of the $GODS was announced at the end of October. At this time there were still only around 10k players on the weekend ranked event. "Blessing of the $GODS" changed everything (The event which started on November 1st was recently extended) - if you are not familiar and would like to learn more about the event and how you can earn $GODS tokens, click here

Since the event started in early November we have seen an explosive growth and consistent increase of new players who want to play Gods Unchained. We had some temporary server issues in the beginning, the game was slow on weekend ranked. But the engineers found a solution to every problem encountered along the way and we have been smooth sailing ever since... except this last weekend when we didn't smooth sail. But sometimes the sea's are rough. On average we have 5-15% increase in players on a weekly basis...

Finally we are getting to December. The biggest event this month was the reopening of the Forge. Some of us were patiently waiting for months to get back the opportunity to forge and trade their core cards. This was a long waited feature of the game by everyone and a huge milestone for the GU team. Next on the line is forging shines and their implementation in p2e ecosystem. Hopefully we see this implemented sometime early next year.

What an amazing year, everyone! The game is growing and gaining popularity and new players joining daily. We recently hit a 100 on google trends. I won't go into detail about all this because Vlemon wrote a detailed article about it and you can see some awesome data points here. No reason to go over the same stuff twice.

All this brings us to today, just couple of days away from New Years. Couple of days away before we reset the counter and watch it all start again from 1/1. Now all that follows bellow are my own personal speculation and things I would love to see unfold in the next 12 months. I am not affiliated with the team in anyway. Everything bellow is nothing but guesses and speculations on my end. It's a fun game to play because -why not try to predict the future? How many would I guess, right? 😉

Here it goes - I think that GU will keep growing and expanding in the following year. I believe that by May next year GodsUnchained will surpass 100k players on the weekend ranked event(maybe even sooner), I think there will be new ways of earning $GODS and P2E events. Possibly we will see different game mods like sealed decks. I also think that by the end of the next year we will see the first GU World Tournament. We will most likely see mobile version for all devices - how soon you may ask? Nobody really knows, my guess is - before the Fall next year. Then you will be able take GU with you anywhere, anytime.

I will stop with my guesses here. I would also like to see what you guys think about the future developments of the game and what will change your experience the most. Please, share your perspective on things. Tell us what you would like to see next?

Anything you want to share write in the comments bellow. The comment with the highest upvote gets a Shadow Dream Stalker.

Second, third, fourth and fifth place all get - Odin's Whiteraven.

Winners will be picked on 3rd of January !!!

This community won't be what it is today without all the people working hard. Thank you all who have contributed and still do. You know who you are!

Many, many thanks to all the dev's and team members who were relentlessly working to make all this happen !!! Have a freaking awesome 2022 !!!

Special thanks to Cern | The Mooderator and Aramas for always being there and helping everyone consistently in GU discord.

Many thanks to all the content creators helping all the new players with endless streams and videos over the years. I hope I don't miss anyone, but if you are new to the community and would like to learn more and get better at the game, give these guys a follow and learn about the game as well as give yourself a chance to win some cool cards from the never ending raffles on their streams:

TheProfesserf
Feanor
Copper Pitch
Cautionfun
The Mudman
Mirage88
FunkMasterHutch
Kargas
BonkThat
Lion
TheeSamBam
FakeMews
Aldous
Jomigloy
Evil_Pekar
DutchM
Freedan

Final thanks to everyone on mount-Olympus, stay awesome! Happy new year everyone!

Thanks for this article. I only joined GU in the last few months of the year so reading this really helped me put the game into perspective and understand its growth. The graph towards the end of the article genuinely intrigues me and helped me understand the crazy explosion GU's playerbase had. Here's to another fruitful and exciting year with GU in 2022!

Regarding thoughts for the new year, personally I'd like to see something done with the core set. At the moment I think the meta gets stale very quickly because expansions are so infrequent. To me the solution lies in the core set. In the discord I was floating the idea of having core cards be in a rotation (i.e. core cards are only made available in small batches—maybe ~30%—for a few weeks before the next 30% are rotated in. The cards are randomly chosen from each rarity so that there's always some legendaries, epics and the like). I think this would add a really fun dynamic to the game since the expansions come like 2 times a year at best right now. Overall I just want a way to freshen up the meta more frequently (I'm kind of over board wipe death and some other decks that have been terrorizing the rank ladder).

Thanks again for the fantastic article! Hope to read more from you in the future.