Hey guys! Welcome to the eighth edition of custom cards made for Gods Unchained. As always, cards were made in this custom cards generator. This time in the improved version where text limits and formating are finally fixed and it works really nice.
In this edition, we will be focusing on the relics with some ideas in improving creating archetypes and some random ideas that might be interesting to you guys. Today's cards will be featuring art from Colin Ashcroft and KodamaCreative. If you like their work, be sure to follow them on their Deviantart pages.
The main idea with this relic was that you can synergize it pretty well with the Enrage god power hence why this relic is so damage-heavy in the right circumstances. For 5 mana you can deal 12 damage over two turns and that is some real potential. To make it more manageable to play against, I went with blitz, rather than godblitz keyword so that if you want to go all-in into your opponent's face, you need to take a little bit of risk yourself, otherwise, it would just feel broken. Other than the Enrage god power, one could also think about creatures with self burn effects like the Inflammable Imbecile or even more "tactical" Soul Jar and of course the Redfume Serum. I think there is a lot of wiggle room to include some of the weaker cards that can help you trigger this effect as this feels like a big payoff when you use it with full potential.
In normal scenarios, this is basically a 1 mana delayed 4/4 or even 6/6, which sounds quite strong, but you need to wait for 3 turns for it to happen. I like this one because it can be used by an Aggro deck to get a 1 mana 4/4 at some point, or for a more defensive deck that can hold on to cards longer, to get a big defensive unit, basically on demand since you are the one that can make the timing of the summon. Either by using all of the durability or by playing another relic, which also can serve as an accelerator for this card. This relic is kind of immune to relic removal since your opponent will only help you summon the creature instead of gaining anything unless they are ready to remove this creature as well I guess.
Nature is pretty packed with random removals but not in the form of a relic. So I thought this could represent the idea in the best way. Most of the time I feel like Nature with the control style gets in a lot of trouble versus random Ward creatures getting in the way of removing some serious threats besides them. A relic like this could help at least a bit in these situations while preserving the randomness Nature has with removal. But there are also other "restrictions" that can screw you over, like hitting randomly your opponent in the face when you really need to remove their creatures. Luckily on the first turn, since the relic has blitz, it can only attack creatures, and even when Confused acts on this turn, you still won't hit face because it is an illegal target for that turn. So when played correctly you will at least have a guarantee that 2 out of 3 durabilities will be used to help you remove threats. Leech is here so that you don't pay too much in terms of health if since it is more or less a late-game stage and you will be mostly hitting creatures with 4+ strength.
High-risk High-reward relic, I suppose. Since you are paying 6 mana to do nothing on the turn you played this card, there is always a risk of it getting removed before you use it even once. But if you end up using it, there will be some value... I mean, a lot of value. It kinda fits perfectly with other Light relics that are pretty slow but value-oriented although since this is a really heavy mid to late-game relic, it kinda adds a sort of a reach potential, which Light doesn't have that much access to. But again, since you need to pay 6 mana and wait a turn, it will be a bit harder to use this card in the aggressive deck but rather in the control style of deck, so I think it would be much more usable as a value-generating tool than face damage. I'd definitely like to see how this card would shape the meta if it was brought to the game.
"How to annoy your opponent" award goes to, of course, Deception. But this time I think it is pretty mild, as your opponent can not only see it coming but also has a chance to react to it if they happen to have relic removal. For 2 mana you can get a little bit of info from your opponent hand and you also have a choice if you'd rather that your opponent redraws another card from their deck or you can deal with what he has and leave it in their hand. I think this card would be hard to use good enough to justify spending a card a 2 mana worth of tempo but more experienced players could find this really useful especially in more late-game focused decks, for finding an opening to go in an all-out attack to finish the game. Anyway, this relic is definitely something that could spice up the playstyle of Deception players.
A very simple idea that could help increase the relevance of the Spell Boost cards that we don't really see anyone using. But nevertheless, it would at least spark up some ideas to support this relic with some unique decklists. Not much to say about this one really. I'd just like to add that we should get a better reason to use Spell Boost as a keyword, otherwise it is just a mechanic that exists but doesn't add any value to the game at all.
In case this relic is confusing to someone. The way it works is as follows. Every time your creature dies, this relic gets 1 durability. Once it is destroyed, the amount of total durability it has is transferred to the variable X and then you summon random creatures from the void until their combined cost reached X or as close to X as possible with the available creatures in your void. If the relic is destroyed by your opponent's relic removal that reduces the durability of your relic, it won't summon anything since it had to reach 0 durability first, before it got destroyed. That's why you can use the Ability to destroy your relic at any amount of durability as you please.
The best use case for this relic is of course Zoo since you will be trading a couple of creatures almost every turn and this is important since you paid 4 mana and to get that value/tempo from this relic you need to kill off at least 3 of your creatures. Over time you can get as many durability as you want but you also need to remember that you have a finite space on the board so being too greedy and holding onto this relic for too long won't get you an infinite amount of value. Also, since the creatures getting revived are random, it doesn't always guarantee you that you will get an X amount of mana but in many cases, you will get more than 4 mana back but you need to build it up first. Your opponent needs to have relic removal pretty quickly before they aren't able to destroy it, still, they can use their removal to lower the potential of the effect by lowering the X, at least in the short term.
This is it for today's custom cards edition. I hope you enjoyed this one. Relics can be made for some really diverse roles but it is always a problem to think about it in the way of the risk and reward spectrum since your opponent can react to them with removal even before you are able to use them. Sometimes this problem can be avoided with cards like The Book of Summoning but then you have another problem where you can "cheat out" the effect by destroying your relic "too early". I feel like relics are really hard to design well but the GU team is doing it pretty well so far. What do you guys think of these designs? Anything interesting in particular? Please leave your thoughts in the comments.
Gods Unchained Official Roadmap:
https://trello.com/b/GpDgnYPZ/gods-unchained-roadmap
Useful tools for Gods Unchained statistics, meta, deckbuilding, leaderboards, etc. :
https://unchainedstats.com/
https://gudecks.com/
Current List of Cards in Sanctum Decks:
https://www.reddit.com/r/GodsUnchained/comments/fhsqnl/sanctum_deck_update_13032020/
Markets:
https://gu.cards/
https://tokentrove.io/GodsUnchainedCards
https://opensea.io/assets/gods-unchained
Raffle:
https://www.mythictitan.com/raffle/?place=marketplace
Custom cards generator tool:
https://www.gucustom.cards/
Gods Unchained discord channel:
https://discord.gg/G8YAWcX
Thank you for reading!
,z3ll
