In a blogpost yesterday, Gods Unchained staff laid out their vision for additional changes to the sleep mechanic:
https://blog.godsunchained.com/2022/01/31/sleep-2-0-hits-ptr/
The deck with the highest win rate (for a long time) is "Board Wipe Death." It's not just a little bit better. It's a lot better.
And this 71% is a mix of various BWD decks. Highly-tuned decks with the best cards have win rates like:
Are devs aware of this? Well, consider that Yawgmoth (with a 91% win rate in 45 games) is a dev, so yea, they are aware.
One of the most expensive cards in GU is the Demogorgon. These aren't unrelated phenomena. The core idea behind BWD is to chain sleep your opponent for 9+ turns until you can start dropping Demos and other game-winning cards.
As you can also imagine, playing against this deck for 20-30 minutes where your creatures are sleeping every turn isn't a fun experience. At 2 ETH (currently) for a top deck, it is the definition of pay-2-win. Finally, long game times and a mobile release don't go well together. Finally, note that all the cards above are from the Genesis set. A promise made to early investors is that these cards will not be changed and will be "evergreen" (they won't be rotated out in a new season). For all these reasons, GU devs have been on a campaign of indirectly nerfing these cards.
Relatively recently, sleep was changed indirectly by changing the ward mechanic to block sleep. Now devs are targeting sleep directly by having damage wake the sleeping creature up. This is a nerf to BWD in general, but a direct nerf to Demogorgon, which deals 3 damage to a sleeping creature. If your opponent is wide with small creatures, and Demo kills the creature it attacks, no problem. However, at 7 mana against dominant decks like Big Beast Nature, Demo will likely hit (and not kill) large creatures. Those creatures will wake up and then be able to kill the Demo or hit face for lethal damage.
Not that War needed more buffs, but many of it's existing tools will now double as anti-sleep tech.
Out of Its Misery is already a great card, and now it will be even better. OOIM and Auric Mage are both relatively common already, which is important. In weekend ranked, it's generally not wise to tech against sleep, because the deck is so rare (2% popularity in the first pic). However, having great cards like Radiant Dawn that are also good against sleep is a huge blow to BWD.
In addition to the change to sleep, devs also announced card changes. Most creatures with roar damage are currently restricted to damaging enemy creatures. Many are being changed to simply deal damage to any target.
The other big change is to wildfire, which will now damage all creatures before giving them +1/+1 and regen. Like Radiant Dawn, this is now a good card that also becomes excellent against sleep.
I firmly believe this is a good change for the long-term health of the game. However. My sincere condolences for regular Joes who took a big risk buying Demos at $1,500 if that is a lot of money to you (it is to me). The same lesson is being repeated with every balance patch: this isn't some immutable ledger like Bitcoin. There are no guarantees. I think I always knew this, but it was driven home when they straight up removed the Chosen One god power and destroyed the value of Light's chosen one cards.
My only gripe about the current changes are the card changes. "Deal 1 damage" is too strong in a game that now includes the Frenzy mechanic.
Cards that deal damage to any target have been relatively limited. There are either conditions or the card can only do face OR creature damage.
It seems like the proposed changes were the result of focusing on sleep without considering the larger ramifications. Instead, the cards could easily read "Deal 1 damage to a creature." If there are certain cards that Devs want to proc frenzy, that may be OK, but the current batch changes just seem like they missed an important detail.
Edit: The devs responded to this point in discord. "Deal 1 damage to a creature" would force you to ping your own creatures if the opponent's board is empty. This is how Wicked Fae works, and it is annoying. They wanted to avoid it. I get that. Seems like they should remove the requirement to self-ping, but that's probably a larger problem to tackel.
Sources:
https://gu-list-creator.vercel.app/
https://www.gucustom.cards/c
