Recently, the Gods Unchained Team announced a spicy update to the Divine Order set, striking many cards with the nerf hammer while making changes to underutilized cards. The full list of changes can be found on the Discord Balance Updates section, but you can also read this detailed breakdown by @entrepidus here for some opinionated takes on the changes.

These changes haven't gone live yet but they were playable by everyone for about a day on the Public Test Realm (PTR) yesterday. I decided to play a little in the PTR just to see how big the impact would be for some of these changes. Here's how it went.

The General Experience

When you enter the PTR, you automatically get 2x of each collectible card in your collection so you can test whatever decks you wish to play. Wanna try Board Wipe Death without forking out a kidney and a liver? Sure. Wanna just play the exact same decks as you did in the original client? No problem. The limit is the sky. A small quip that I had was that the updated cards initially showed their original stats in the collection and deck builder although they did have the correct stats in-game. A cache clear might have helped to solve this niggling issue.

Since rewards don't carry over to your account on the live server, there are way fewer players on the PTR. Queue times for matches can go up to a few minutes if you're unlucky. Also, you never know what actual skill level your opponent is playing at since everyone's ranks are reset to Rusted Bronze, although most players in the PTR would likely have higher ranks since higher-ranked players are the ones who like to test changes and see how they can break the new meta.

Other than these two things, everything else was the same as the normal client.

Playtesting Counterfeit

The updated Counterfeit is absolutely bonkers for relic removal. This is one of the biggest buffs in the list of changes and I wanted to see whether it is really that insane. Even though I haven't played much Deception, I decided to put together a Hidden Rush Deception deck to try Counterfeit out.

In this game, I played against an Aggro War deck. War decks tend to have many relics so it was perfect for seeing how insane Counterfeit could get.

In the first two turns, my opponent played the classic Enduring Shield into Warmonger Smith. Since Warmonger Smith got nerfed to only giving a +1 strength bonus, my opponent couldn't kill my Switch Duelist in just one blow. In the early game, the difference between a 2 and 3 damage attack is huge. I felt like the nerf to Warmonger Smith made War a lot meeker in the early game. It's regrettable that I didn't have a Counterfeit in my opening hand. It would have been the perfect set-up to show just how strong Counterfeit is.

A few turns later, an Oddi was dropped. I don't think the Backline removal for Oddi changed too much in terms of how it is played. I do think it's a good change since it does make Oddi less annoying to remove while still retaining what makes Oddi so great.

When I managed to draw Counterfeit a few turns later, I managed to steal a vanilla 2/2 relic with it. Not too bad, but even this was a pretty good tempo swing. In longer games, unconditionally stealing a relic can potentially be game-winning. Imagine being able to steal a Magic Missile Launcher!

Finally, one last changed card that I encountered was the Covetous Cutthroat. It received a +1/+1 buff in stats, making it a 4/4. With this buff, Covetous Cutthroat becomes a much more viable card to include in most decks since it only receives a -1 health penalty compared to the vanilla 4/5 statline for its ability. My opponent played this against my Counterfeit-ed Barbed Hook and promptly won the battle because of that one extra health.

That's it?

Sadly, given that the PTR was only open for one measly day (come on devs, one day is not enough for testing...), I only played about 5 matches on the PTR before it was closed. The rest of the matches weren't remarkable and I wasn't too stoked at waiting 3 minutes in-between each match due to the lack of players.

To incentivize playing on the PTR, I think a small participation reward, like a thousand Stars, could be given to PTR players. The more PTR players there are, the better testing can be carried out and the more data there will be for the GU team. If the aim of opening the PTR isn't to get gameplay data about the changed cards, then I'm quite curious why the changes couldn't just be released to the original client once the time was right.

Have you tried playing on the PTR? What were your experiences like?

Post Header image source: Gods Unchained Media Kit

Updated PTR card images were generated by https://gucustom.cards with data pulled from the original Discord update.

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