This post is about making cards more interesting and desirable as assets, as well as using the Forge creatively to reward player commitment to the game and generate value for them.
This is 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.
When Chris Clay joined Immutable X and took over GU development, he recorded this video. One of the most interesting things he talks about is the idea of attaching a record of notable events to individual cards. I think this is a very elegant way of differentiating cards and increasing their value.
Here are some examples of what could be recorded as metadata:
Player ID who minted the card
The source of the card - premium pack, Weekend Ranked reward, Sealed reward, Forge, etc.
Tournament details for cards that were used in the winning deck
Cards minted within 24h of a new expansion launch
Some kind of digital version of the illustrator that created the card art receiving a few copies to 'sign' and distribute. They could run events on their own social media pages to promote themselves and distribute the cards among the participants of the events. The cards could have some metadata proving they originated with illustrator and some small visual cue as well.
This could become part of the promotional events around new expansion releases. A lot of GU players appreciate the card art and I'm sure they'd enjoy an opportunity to interact with the people who made the art a reality.
A similar idea could be applied to popular streamers or influential players.
Although technically part of the metadata, this topic deserves a separate section. Determining first mints in Gods Unchained can be tricky. There are 3 competing criteria:
Mint date. The problem here is many cards share exactly the same timestamp
Transaction ID of the mint event
Token ID that uniquely identifies the individual NFT
Considering only the IDs is also not straightforward. Oftentimes the ranking is different for transactions and tokens.
Here is an example for Nethergram. The cards are ordered by transaction ID, but in this ranking the token ID of the top card is higher than the next 3 cards:
So a criteria would have to be selected: which ID most accurately reflects the order in which a card was generated?
And for the cards that were minted initially in Ethereum mainnet, there is also the question of which to consider, the mint on L1 or the mint on StarkEx L2 post migration?
Yet another question would be to whether or not consider first mints for each quality level, i.e. shine.
Also worth noting is the guys at GU Decks / Token Trove don't think that encouraging first mints to become a mainstream thing is a good idea. And they should know what they are talking about, they deal with card mint problems as part of their job!
https://discord.com/channels/457152051239976961/829499541471625216/1230548183172517970
https://discord.com/channels/457152051239976961/829499541471625216/1230552345889210408
Crafting cards at the Forge has served a few purposes so far: mint Core cards, upgrade card quality and obtain crafted-only cards for some of the new expansion sets. This last use case is very problematic in my mind. First, the process we have now is slow and cumbersome. Then, it feels like a forced gimmick or an excuse to get players to burn existing cards only to obtain new ones that are part of the standard set - cards that would otherwise just be minted directly from packs, weren't for this convoluted process.
I like the idea of forging special cards, but it should be a meaningful process, not simply a means to burn existing cards only to obtain new, standard ones. So here are some ideas to actually make forging an interesting game mechanic.
Create crafting recipes that require scarce account-bound (non-NFT) ingredients, offered as rewards for game activities: placing high in a tournament, in a leaderboard, completing a long or difficult achievement, etc. This would result in crafting low print art variants of existing cards. It could also create scarce cosmetics, which would put on display the player's mastery and commitment to the game. As an additional proof of mastery, the cosmetics could also have metadata, such as the account ID of the minter. These recipes could be either limited in time or permanent, but always with very limited ingredient availability.
I remember fondly playing Diablo 2 and using an Horadric Cube. There were random and fixed recipes, but they were always the same for everyone. Crafting-only cards from Dread Awakening and Tides of Fate already works like that in a sense, but I would develop the concept further by making deterministic recipes unique for each user.
Let's say for example the game reaches a point where card reprints would become necessary. Common cards could be generated by applying a fixed recipe that consumes abundant cards from the current expansion. Then for Rare or above cards, the recipes would be random or pseudo-random but different for each account, based off an unique seed. This mechanism could start with a relatively generous number of possible combinations for Rare cards and get increasingly narrower for Epics and Legendaries.
Some of the forging ingredients could be dependent on a measure of player activity, account age or Set completion, so this game mechanic would become a potential reward for the most dedicated players, while also encouraging more players to become collectors and reap benefits from holding a large collection.
The player wouldn't know beforehand which combination of ingredients would yield which card, but once found the same combination of ingredients would always yield the same outcome. So a player invested in discovering recipes would repeatedly throw into the Forge a diverse combination of ingredients and check what comes out. The forge should always reward something - another card, a cosmetic, an entry ticket, etc. The player would be incentivized to try many combinations of ingredients, trying to discover their own unique recipes yielding the most valuable items.
So instead of one person discovering a recipe and everyone flooding the market, only the people who actually put the effort, invested and got a little lucky would be able to forge special assets. This may seem frustrating at first, but it just a form of systematic gambling if you will. From my experience in other games this is a popular activity that generally appeals to players with funds and who like the thrill of a bit of high stakes gambling of sorts.
Once a player finds a desirable recipe unique to their account, they can repeat it many times to produce the same item, which would potentially be sold with profit, especially if not many players had discovered a recipe for that particular item. This mechanism would distribute evenly the buying pressure for cards burned during the discovery process, and also contribute to keeping the card prices closer to what should be expected from packs prices.
Another idea to spice up the Forge is to introduce a 'Glitched' quality tier. These cards would result from a printing defect, where the color layers didn't align properly for example, resulting in a slightly defective image. This means the only source of Glitched cards would be a random, extremely rare event while using the Forge. Cards from packs would always be of perfect mint quality and would never contain Glitched cards.
Glitched cards would not be usable in the Forge - they wouldn't be suitable targets for any other Forge recipe, since they would be technically defective...
In terms of DP&E rewards, these cards could yield at least the same rewards as Diamond cards. I would tune the algorithm to make them significantly more scarce than Diamonds, but not as scarce as to become almost 1/1s. I would aim perhaps at 2-4 Glitched card per month, so each one would be newsworthy and become part of the daily conversation.
