Hi Everyone,
thank you for stopping by and reading through another one of my posts.
Divine Order set just came out few days ago and with it a bunch of new and exciting cards which created quite the controversy in God's Unchained discord within most players -including myself.
The cards everyone is talking about is Rolling Thunder and Thunder caller. The complaints and the dread in #balance were depressing, people couldn't sleep and they were in pain. You could just tell. The pain was more mental than physical and the stress was piling up. All this frustration was close to unbearable for a lot of players. Some of them even vowed that they will stop playing GodsUnchained for a few days, maybe even a week!!! Can you imagine the outrage!!! The feeling in the chat was, and still is quite horrendous. Real feelings were hurt!
But hey, look at those two beautiful cards and tell me how can you hate on them so much?
At first, I thought this is unfair, how can there be a card like this... 56 points on the board with single drop. There is nothing I could do against it. I joined on " The Big Thunder Caller Cry" on their Discord to join the outrage. I mean, combine this card with couple of early boosters like - "Inspiring Skald" and "Revered Seer":
Now add a drop of "Valka's Captain" and Oddi, Valka's Herald (Oddi... what a silly name):
And then you really have a recipe for pure destruction and you are on the receiving end. It's just not fun when you lose 90% of the time. There were people who do not have the cards, people who do have the cards, but refuse to play them and everyone was so frustrated. They shared the words of love and compassion non stop in #balance. But hey friend, don't frown!
This is just another problem we as players encounter and need to find a creative solution in order to solve it. There is nothing unbeatable in GU, it's just a matter of time and experimenting with the right combinations of cards in order to solve the problem you are facing... with a little bit of luck.
So after I realized that complaining in the discord channel might help tune the card down.... eventually, this is not a resolve I am willing to wait on. We all know by now that balancing the game takes time. The team currently has plenty on their shoulders, so please be polite and patient with them. They are doing their best. It's not their fault "Rolling Thunder" is rolling so hard.... Or is it?
So anyways, let's leave the jokes aside and get back on point. What is the solution to "Rolling Thunder" and "Thunder Caller" and the rest of the Agro War plays we see all weekend with remarkable 80%+ win ratio?
First we have to see what they have in common. And what they have in common is that all cards listed above are: mana 2 and 3 cards with the exception of the Revered Seer. But we can figure out what to do with Revered Seer later. Now, the first thing this brought to my mind was:
Dust to Dust.This card in particular works wonders for the thunder caller insanity and stops it it's tracks right off the bat. Once the board is filled with Thunder callers, it does not matter what stats they have, because they will always be 3 mana creatures. This card for me was the beginning for building a 80%+ winning rate death deck which got me all the way to the number one spot in Mythic. Even so this might be just temporarily, I won't call it luck because after 34 games I had a win ratio of 84.4%. GU is constantly evolving game, new card combinations are being discovered daily. What might work today, most likely won't work tomorrow. But for now against the stereotypical Thunder caller war, Board Wipe Death is killing it There is a link to my deck at the end of the article if you would like to see what got me to the number one spot this weekend.
Keep in mind that I am not a F2P player, and if you are a F2P player you will have to get quite creative with the cards you have. Hopefully you won some packs through the weekend ranked tournaments and you can supplement some of the cards you're missing in order to build the best War counter deck you can. With that being said the next card on my list is - Eva, Baroness of the Death.
This is just a sick card, it gives you control of the board early while you transition into mid range with your stronger creatures and take control of the board. This card is Agro decks nightmare...
As long as you have couple of creatures on the board, you are going to be more than happy to drop this old lady in the mix. Every time she dies, she converts a creature with up to 4 mana into a zombie... which in turn after it dies, converts another creature up to 4 mana into a zombie. Pretty fun, right? If you manage to pull Eva early in the game, you get control of the board while you are waiting on your "dust to dust" to drop in your hand as an extra insurance policy. Your main goal is to survive the early rounds. You can combine all this with few other board wipe spells like - "Apocalypse now", "End Times" and "Blackblood Blast"
The strategy here is to hold off to late game where agro decks are not prepared to face your heavy 8 mana and 9 mana creatures. For the F2P players - "dust to dust" and "Blackblood Blast" are core cards and you might have them in your card collection already. Those board clear cards are the core of this deck and style of play.
Could there be any other options and possibilities out there to currently face war and even the odds? Most likely, yes. Probably there are a lot of card combinations which are not even found yet and there is a lot to explore with "Order" and the rest of the gods. I couldn't figure order out, but this deck worked for me and still works. It's doing a good job of slowing war down and letting me play the game.
Other cards you might want to consider on top of the ones mentioned are "life generating" and "leech" cards. If you don't have leach creatures, you need life replacement in order to push through the late stages of the game. War is quite devastating early with it's god power wiping 2 HP every turn and giving frenzy to it's creatures. You need to be able to recover life one way or another.
Next on the list of importance for structure removal and Thunder caller removal early if I don't get lucky with my draw is - "Soul Shatter"
This card is super effective against - Pyramid Warden, Thunder Caller, Bronze Gate and any other annoying "3 mana or less" creature that gets on your nerves. It's a really cheap TOTG card, and I would recommend you checking it out.... here.
After you survive 7 mana, it's game over for WAR. At this point you should have plenty of board wipe options and comfortably be able to bring out your heavy artillery's. Big creatures with heavy frontline while you maintain control of the board work best here. You will surely see at some point your opponent wearing out and usually quitting before the game ends. Here are some suggestions on what you can throw down late game. "End times" wipes and counters heavy, "Helian Elite" is a solid line of defense that shouldn't be ignored. Now depending on your collection after that you can pick your finisher. I personally chose "Polyhymnia, Aetheric Hydra" - Mostly because this thing is insane in defending the castle. And for a finisher I chose "Hippacria's Monster" Once this beast stacks your void, it's a one hit kill whatever it touches including your opponent's god. If you don't have these cards you can substitute with heavy 8's and whatever other 9's you have. And that's it. War is not that much of a danger anymore. If you find a different strategy to counter war with Deception or any other god, please feel free to message me. I would love to explore different options and different decks.
Now the fun part - a small gift from me to one lucky you:
I have an additional hidden strategy I use in this deck, also shared bellow. If someone can figure out what it is, leave it in the comments bellow. If you guess it right, I will gift you a Meteorite "Eva, The Baroness of Death". There is only one Eva to give away. So first one who guess it right, gets it.
I hope you had fun reading this and I hope you are enjoying the new, improved and challenging Gods Unchained, where winning is not as easy as it used to be.... unless you play war 😉 !!!
a link to my deck if you want to pick my brain....
Disclaimer: Everything written above is not a financial advice. I am not a financial advisor. This is a TCG crypto game and I play the game a lot so I am surely biased. All opinions mentioned above are only mine and I am NOT affiliated and I DO NOT WORK for GodsUnchained. You get the gist.
Happy Sunday everybody! Stay awesome !!!
😊