God Powers Refresh

It seems like it has been a while but we took a good hard look at god powers it is about time some of these got a bit of a makeover. In this release you will see that we have rotated out 3 older GPs in favor of some new ones, and were here to talk about it.

Why Change God Powers

GU is a dynamic game with dynamic changes. The meta is constantly shifting with the release of new cards and strategies. The players adapt, the gods adapt, why shouldn’t their powers adapt with them.

Unlike some other games, we feel like our Gods are very dynamic. They have a lot of angles of attack and a myriad of strategies they can utilize. Auros is the god of warfare, that means the god of combat, the god of physical strength, the god of combat strategy, the god of sieges, the list goes on and on. Trying to encapsulate the reach of a god like that in 3 powers is hardly the full picture, and we want the powers to reflect the changes and evolution these characters are going through in the story. These updated powers all represent how the gods are adapting to the shifting landscape and brutal war the Everborn have brought to the land, some for good, some not so much.

Additionally, updating god powers provides us a powerful balancing tool. It generally works out that each of the Gods have one power that is used as the default, sometimes up to 75% of the time, one power that is strong but limited to very specific cases, and then one power that becomes extremely niche. Infamously War’s Slayer was for a long time the ticking clock that kept the entire game operating within a certain set of restrictions. If you couldn’t deal with 2 a turn, your control deck just was not going to work, but your aggro deck also had to be fast enough to compete with the reach that slayer provided. Slayer at times represented almost 90% of War’s decks, and that was the kind of dominance we generally have to take some action against.

In this update, we are taking a slightly different approach. We are hoping that by replacing the least used powers with something new, we can encourage players to try something else and help diversify the meta. In a perfect world each God would have a 33.3% three way split between power usage so you could never plan for what might be coming your way, but realistically it’s more important that every GP at least have a viable home where it sees play.

Out: Flip — In: Up My Sleeve

Up My Sleeve is a 2 mana Deception power that reads “Discard a card. If you do, draw a card.”

Flip was a very polarized ability. It could dig you very far into your deck searching out combo pieces and saving other combo pieces for later. It’s power was undeniable, but it was also the least used Deception god power and was mostly worthless outside of combo decks like Cobra Scepter or original Mayday. Deception is primarily an aggro to midrange god, and many of the control and combo strategies are also proactive and would generally prefer having a dagger to searching for cards it has in redundant numbers.

We like Deception’s ability to dig, but we wanted it to be more in line with Deception’s current game plans, which are a bit more ruthless and short termed. Up My Sleeve is a little less aggressive in how far it can dig, which means it is less valuable for finding any given single card, but now it offers you a discard instead of a reshuffle.

Deception has a host of cards it can use with a self discarding god power, with more on the way. Mayday has come to represent a large number of Ludia’s followers who yearn to be free from being pawns in her games, and this shift in the power dynamic lead us to creating what we consider a “Mayday power”. Early game it can smooth your draws without giving you the tempo loss you normally get from spending 2 mana on a god power by discarding a Man the Cannons, it can be used midgame to set up value with Martyr of Whiteplain or early Fallen Legion roar, and late game it can dig though your now diminished deck to help you find your last combo piece or game winner for your control list.

Overall we think Up My Sleeve will still fill the role that Flip played, while being a lot more viable to other deck styles and far less polarized than Flip.

Out: Flourish — In: Spread

Spread is a 2 Nature power that reads “Give an Everborn +1/+1.”

Let’s get this out of the way first before we get into the drama. Flourish was bad. Really bad. Even decks that were fully based around regen didn’t use the regen god power. In theory it is a really strong power. It stacks, it adds value to regen matters cards, and it triggers cards that care about healing, but in reality regen is just not the thing that keeps creatures from dying, and 1 point of health for 2 is not a great deal versus a removal ability or a 1/2 body. It needed to go.

Spread is the first tribe specific power we have made. You could argue that the badger is a wild tribe specific power, but this is the first one that simply does not work if you are not playing the tribe. So why start now?

The Everborn are a very limited tribe. There is a very small number of cards they have access to if you want to play the seal, and most lists do. That gives us the ability to control for a lot of variables and ensure this power, which would be crazy if printed for something like Guild, is at a good powerlevel.

Aeona is also the most connected God to the Everborn in our ongoing story. Their emergence has caused her to slowly descend into lunacy, as she can hear the ever growing psychic hum growing as they propagate, growing louder by the hour, and unrelenting. She sees them as a pure form of growth, life unending, the purest expression of her domain. She knows deep inside that there is something unnatural to have life without end, but her inhibitions weaken as she is overtaken by the madness, and she aims to help them.

Since most of Nature’s Everborn center around cloning and regrowing threats, it’s a slower to start strategy and plays a fair game mostly on the battlefield. A simple +1/+1 helps her maintain board presence, convert her Sporophytes into minor threats, and win combats while she builds up her army. It’s not going to have crazy, game prolonging value like create used to, but it helps her current favored tribe have a new angle of play.

As narrow a power as this is, we think it will be a cornerstone of Everborn Nature decks and certainly see more play than Flourish ever did.

Out: Sacrifice — In: Possession

Possession is a god power that reads “Give a creature "Afterlife: Summon a 1/1 Impling."”

Sacrifice was a very good power in the right deck, and repeatable card draw is a scary thing, but it was the least used power in Death by a pretty wide margin and the decks that were using it were generally not the decks we want dominating the game. With the last few sets, Death has an over abundance of cards that draw cards like Dark Skies that make the power a little redundant.

Keen-eyed observers may have noticed a lot of Implings in the Spoils set. They have been around since the earliest days of Gods Unchained but never really had a comprehensive theme, which is something we are hoping to change because they are pretty iconic for the domain. This god power in part will help empower that strategy, but it is also much more valuable than that to a wide range of decks.

The ability to make sticky minions is always strong in a domain that has as many boardwipes as Death does. You can stack these across your army and still have a smaller imp army waiting in the wings. You can use it on your opponents creatures to ensure when your Anubians come back from the Land of the Dead you have a bunch of targets to crash into for priestess triggers.

Do we think this is going to be the most used God power in Death? Not by a long shot. Ignite is still generically useful against the widest variety of decks and Soul Burn is what really fuels most of Death’s aggressive strategies, but we think this will be far more interesting for decks to try and utilize to empower Dreadtouched and create removal resistant boards.

Only Three This Time

Truth be told, we originally had 5 new god powers we were going to rotate in, but we couldn’t get two of them into the state we wanted them in to release them. They may still come out at a later date when the meta shifts with some new releases, but for now we feel 3 new powers is going to be enough of a shake up and move us in enough of a positive direction so that we are not fully overturning the apple cart on everyone. We like how these are going to tie into the storyline as it evolves, and are really excited to see what the brewers come up with.

Sound off in the discord Mortals. Let us know how you feel about our Gods new abilities.