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 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 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.
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.
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.
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)
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).
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:
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.
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.
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!
