[Gods Unchained] Game Update 0.22 - New Boards, Leaks, And Some Big Changes!

Hey Guys! Today we got a new patch 0.22 in Gods Unchained which was reviewed on the GU official stream with some extra teases and leaks. If you want to see all of it take a look at this VOD or read about it on their blog (no leaks included here though). In this post, we gonna mention some of these but the focus will be more on the changes in fundamental game mechanics that involve Fatigue, hand management, and so-called, the Cleanup step.

New Boards

Before we jump into mechanics this is one of the new boards we are getting and its called Arena. The other one was already shown, which is the "night mode" version of the Temple. The Default board was temporarily removed and will probably come back with some improvements later. I just gotta say it, this one looks pretty darn good! On the VOD there was an accidental leak of some of the boards that are still in the works plus some trinkets too. Unfortunately, we were only able to see a glimpse of the names that didn't even have their icons. We can only imagine what are those. Anyone interested to see these check the VOD at 10:52.

The river got some VFX upgrades with some sparkling effects and looks pretty neat.

With that out of the way, let's see what changes happened to the actual gameplay.

Fatigue

Fatigue is not really often talked about, well because you don't encounter it that often so it isn't the most important thing to talk about but now it's the time because there are some changes.

The old system was working in a weird way where every time you need to draw a card from your deck but you don' have any, you would be locked out of some of your mana and when your mana reaches zero you lose the game. This would happen across five turns if you didn't have to draw any extra cards for some reason.

The new system is quite different. There is no mana locking involved rather it works like this. If you couldn't draw a card due to your deck being empty, at the end of that turn your god takes damage equal to your unspent mana. With this system, we can expect that you will be able to stay alive much longer in fatigue, especially if you have a way of generating new cards that doesn't involve drawing them. Nature might be the best candidate to stay alive long in fatigue due to god power Forage and many other value cards that generate multiple other cards and also a lot of sustain.

The change in fatigue mechanic wouldn't usually be such a big game-changer but because of the next change, we might see players going into fatigue more frequently so this slowly killing fatigue system is much better.

Introduction of Milling

Before this change, if you reached the limit of your hand size of 9 cards and are supposed to draw the next card, nothing would happen and that card would stay on top of your deck. But with the new system, the game has now introduced what is commonly called "Milling" of cards.

To mill a card, simply means that if you aren't able to draw a card due to reaching your hand limit, each card you have to draw will be shown to the opponent and discarded, in this case, obliterated and you're basically losing the access to that card for the rest of the game.

This is a huge change and the community already raised some concerns regarding some of the Death cards that obviously weren't balanced with this mechanic in mind so we might start seeing those more and more and this will enable a new archetype of decks that revolve around milling your opponent out of cards, this might have a huge impact on the game but we will have to see how this goes in the next couple of days. I'm pretty confident some of those cards will need to be toned down and adjusted accordingly to this new way of playing the game.

The Cleanup Steps

The last thing on this list is actually not a new mechanic but more of a rulebook or guideline, in which order the game processes the play when multiple things are happening at once. This was made in order to make it clear to all players in which order different effects and events will trigger to make it easier to understand what's going on in each possible scenario.

The steps look like this:

1. Moves soulless cards to the obliterated zone
2. Moves destroyed cards to the void (when spells are cast, they are considered destroyed.)
3. Resets the current health/durability of cards just added to the void
4. Adds any effects related to cards moving zones to the event queue
5. Adds Afterlife effects to the event queue
6. If any effects were added in the previous steps, the cleanup step is canceled, the new effects are resolved and a new cleanup step is started
7. Fully resets the stats of all cards in the void that have not yet been reset
8. Triggers any effects that are supposed to occur after cleanup. (Apocalypse Now is a good example, the second ‘destroy all creatures’ waits until this point to trigger.)
9. Again, if any effects have been added, cancel the cleanup step, resolve, then start over.
10. If any gods are at 0 health, end the game, if both gods are at 0 health, the player whose turn it wins. (Previously it was determined by back end logic that wasn’t clear to players.)

This is pretty much it, we got some server stability improvement, a lot of bug fixes, and other in-game issues and you can read more about those on their blog. What do you guys think about the new fatigue system? And what about the introduction of milling? Is that good or bad? I kinda liked the old ones because they were sort of unique but it makes a lot of sense to go for more traditional ways, we'll see about that.

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