Introduction

Last week, I talked about the legendary cards coming in the Tides of Fate set. I actually wanted to move on to talk about epics today but that will be on pause. Today, I want to cover my thoughts on the Tides of Fate: collector's guide that GU recently shared in their blog.

4 Ways To Collect

Now to complete the whole set, you need to purchase packs, craft, participate in faction skirmishes and winning packs from weekend ranked and sealed. In previous major sets, we could just buy the packs or play weekend ranked and eventually get all the cards from just playing or buying. They have now made it harder to collect all the cards and I believe that this will help the value of the cards.

Crystal & Fate Packs
One of the interesting points from this collecting is that there will be two different kinds of packs. One is being bought and one is being earned from playing. The one being bought is crystal packs and they follow the same drop rates as previous sets. The difference between crystal packs and previous major set packs is that they don't include all the cards from the set and they also contain exclusive cards so to get them you will either need to buy packs or buy from secondary market. I have mixed feelings about this idea of nerfing the reward packs but I think it's worth trying and seeing what happens because if GU kept doing what they did before nothing would change.

I think a big problem is we just printed too much. There needs to be a limited supply in the packs distributed. I think weekend rewards needs to be revamped in a way or maybe make it like a seasonal rating thing like we have in Splinterlands. This way they can set a number of packs to giveaway every weekend or every season it'll be easier to have a consistent number than depending on how much people play over the weekend.

Weekend & Sealed
Now weekend rewards and sealed mode will get fate packs which is basically a nerfed and watered down crystal pack. I think this was to make it so legendary cards will retain their value. If you see the value of the legendary cards from the last set, some legendary cards are at a dollar or less. Personally, I don't know if I will be playing sealed mode as the packs you earn from this mode aren't able to get legendary cards. I understand they want to keep the value of legendary cards but they also need to make it rewarding to play. I'm not too big of a fan of cosmetics so sealed mode would just be wasting god tokens in my opinion.

Community Events
I like community events. I think of it as like a raid war. It makes it more fun where the community can complete goals together. I don't have any issue with having some cards being earned through this method and it's a good way to have people participate. These are great cards to get for basically free by participating so I hope people don't sleep on these legendary cards.

Crafting A Mistake?
Let's get to the controversial part about the news where there was a negative reaction from the discord. This had to do with the crafting details. There's actually a few legendary and epics to craft but I just showed one as an example as they were pretty similar. I didn't understand why it would only take 10 epics of the same card to forge a legendary but to forge an epic you would need four different cards and two of these cards are from an older set and has to be diamond quality. It doesn't make sense to me that the epic card would be harder to forge than the legendary card.

When I saw the announcement, I went straight to the marketplace but I was way too slow. Someone cleaned the floor on the crafting materials which kind of disturbs me.

If GU feels like we have too many cards, we can do a card burning event and give some exclusive cards there from cards being burned. I think that would help lower the supply of cards. Of course older editions being burned would give more points.

Conclusion

GU is really trying to find a way to make the game sustainable and for long-term. We can see the efforts being made with this Tides of Fate set. It seems to me like they are trying to keep the value of the cards. Although there are some negative reactions to this news, I think we should be bullish and proud that the team is working on making GU great. I can't wait to see a world championship for GU and esports like Hearthstone has. We could very well see this happen in a year or two.

On side note, I will play this weekend after a few months of hiatus to see what i will get from my fate packs if I do get them! See you on the battlefield. Please go easy on me!