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A lot of people, including myself, have been looking at blockchain games lately and whenever a new one pops up one of the first questions that comes to mind is: "is it pay 2 win?". Not surprising considering many of these lay so much weight on investors and at the same time fund development and growth by selling people ingame items such as genesis assets that may not be obtained later on to prove the point that "you should get in on this cause you can make a decent return". Now while this is understandable marketing considering the many projects in crypto that to investors do really well so blockchain games feel the need to try and compete with them, to regular players this may not feel that great if they aren't able to purchase assets worth $100-10,000. Even more so if these assets are crucial to the gameplay and competitive scene.

Now I don't have too much experience with competitive play in most popular blockchain games that exist today, I threw my hat into the ring for a very short period in the early stages of @splinterlands but wanted to cash out back for Steem when Steem was dropping as I saw that to be worth more in the long term (boy was I in for a surprise there when it just kept dropping to a whopping -98% from ATH). One game that I have been playing somewhat constantly, though, and also stayed invested (mostly cause I had no other choice when ETH network fees made trading of their game assets literally impossible) is Gods Unchained. I've enjoyed Hearthstone which was a trading card game created by Blizzard back in the day, especially when it came to mobile as on the PC I would just prefer to play World of Warcraft instead, so my interest in Gods Unchained was pretty high as it is quite similar in gameplay. 

I invested in the Genesis Cards of this game pretty early, I think my average buy in was around $120 per Ethereum and even though it's going to be a steep hill to climb considering ETH's performance recently, the NFT hype is growing day by day so I may still do well in $ returns once these assets become tradable again and the game grows from its current stages with something we also lack here on Hive; marketing. 

Okay so back to my point, many have been complaining that Gods Unchained is pay 2 win, new players don't have Genesis Cards, they can't even purchase them even if they wanted to and feel that players/investors who do have them have a too big of an advantage in the game using these cards. 

Time and time again, though, it has been proven that Gods Unchained has made access to competitive cards and decks for anyone starting out have a real shot at "play 2 earn". Even though it doesn't mean much right now, cause the only way to earn cards from the current season that's for sale right now (through credit cards obviously cause ETH is unusable), is to participate in the weekend tournaments where you have a shot to win season 2 "trial of the gods" packs depending on your performance during those 3 days every weekend.

There is a website called gudecks.com that tracks your performance and let's you know how close you are to getting to the next reward tier and how many of the required weekend games you've played so far. It displays it like this:


![image.png](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/acidyo/E0pZlUrx-image.png)

What got me to write this post in the first place was that there was a [reddit post](https://www.reddit.com/r/GodsUnchained/comments/ll7t98/reacher_mythic_in_3_days_new_player_have_a_bunch/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) in the gods unchained subreddit recently stating that a new player has made it to the Mythic rank of Gods Unchained. Now to many this may seem too good to be true, how can a new player without being able to purchase Genesis Cards perform so well. Well the reason this is nothing "new" and that many players have managed to do just as good in the past is that the way Gods Unchained works is different from other games, skill and strategy here matters. Now I'm not going to tell you that having all Genesis Cards or all Trial of the Gods cards is not going to help you, but just having the latter without the skill won't and I'm a prime example of that. I own all Gensis cards, and even though I don't own all Trial of the Gods cards (not even close) cause the bear market was a bit too long for us Hivers and there's no way I'm going to be selling Hive at these prices to invest more in GU than I already have. I figured I'd try for fun to re-create this new players deck and see how well I'd do playing it.

On the gudecks.com site I was able to find the Reddit user as he was using the same name and is currently ranked #13 of all players, there I could see what decks he's been playing with and his performance with each. My eyes of course landed on this one Light Deck that had an amazing 11 wins, 0 losses streak going so I attempted to copy it.


![image.png](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/acidyo/59KD5YxN-image.png)
 
After I was done copying it, I decided to record some gameplay to show you who don't know about Gods Unchained what the game is like so you can better understand how playstyle, RNG, Gods, God Powers and especially the Sanctum can effect the matches more than what cards you're holding and how much money you've spent on them. As you can see from the screenshot above estimated price for that deck is 0.0334 ETH which is quite a bit of money right now but once the markets open again and these core cards can be sold once more (and there's a lot more of these core cards that have been created during the downtime of the markets) I'm sure it's going to become even cheaper.


![image.png](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/acidyo/XAJ68mcA-image.png)

This was a pretty interesting game and it also shows how important the Sanctum is which is something that has set the game aside a lot from Hearthstone ever since it's implementation. It also goes to show that new players like the one mentioned above who just spend some time playing with the welcome starter decks can get themselves some core cards by leveling up and use them to do well in the weekend tournaments to earn packs they may be able to sell later if they don't need the cards themselves. 

https://youtu.be/CBmAAGTIFd4

<center>_Apologies for the aspect ratio, not sure why it decided to record it this way._</center>

So what will happen when the markets arrive and all these cards are available for selling again, will it become pay 2 win then? Well, yes and no, it will surely take a lot of time and grind off of new players who are just getting into the game. They won't need to level up as much to get the core cards they want to play, especially the legendary core cards, but it's still important to know how to play to get far in the game, cards alone won't get you there which is what this post was about. Trust me, I've seen players like @steeminator3000 get to mythic and top of the weekend tournaments time after time with decks they've created themselves even while he was lacking a lot of genesis cards I had while I wasn't able to get there cause these kind of games are just not something I'm great at. I know my limits and I know I'm bad at building decks so that's kind of my point, from an investors kind of view I don't mind it that much but from a player's point of view I like that other players who are more familiar with these kind of games and have the head for it are able to beat me in matches. No matter if I drop 2x demogorgon's who are pretty expensive or Pyramid Warden's who are the most expensive rare genesis card in existence, they can still find a way to beat me at the end of the match and that's what in my opinion makes for a great game with the potential to go mainstream and introduce more and more players to the blockchain space and why asset ownership is important and will change the way games will be viewed in the near future to give players more power and even the ability to earn some crypto for playing them. In the current scenes of esports, streaming and tournaments becoming bigger and bigger, blockchain gaming will bridge that level of "having to be at the top and only a small % of players being able to earn anything from their careers" to giving everyone a chance to make some money off of it. Gods Unchained has already managed to do this even though it was short lived and been on a break for a long time due to Ethereum, @splinterlands has managed to do this and continues to do so on a daily basis and from here on out I am sure more and more games will be doing the same thing moving forward. 

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If you haven't played Gods Unchained yet and would like to give it a try (it is free to play), I'd appreciate it if [you used my invite link.](https://godsunchained.com/?refcode=0x826F51B323e83F2e2799055b7E39b1661a056059)

Let me know how it goes, if and when immutable X launches that will make all assets tradable again I'm planning on further growing the Gods Unchained OCD team and even offering leasing of cards to players who want to continue playing it but not buy the cards off the market, hopefully IMX makes leasing available just like @splinterlands has. If only GU had just migrated to Hive after the countless times I've suggested them to who knows how far this game could've gotten already, but oh well. Hopefully it does its part in bringing more adoption to the blockchain space.

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<sub>[Banner Source](https://siliconangle.com/2019/09/23/developer-gods-unchained-blockchain-card-game-raises-15m-funding/)</sub>

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