Gods Unchained is a Play-to-Earn (P2E) online trading card game built on top of the Immutable X blockchain. The game promises ownership of certain cards and assets by allowing you to buy and sell them through a marketplace.

It plays a little like a simplified version of Magic: The Gathering Arena or Hearthstone – two players face off against each other using themed decks. They must use mana to summon creatures, weapons, and spells with the goal of attacking their opponents’ defences and reducing their health to zero. Starting off, players get several premade decks and a collection of free starter cards that allow you to play right from the get-go. As you earn experience by battling online opponents, you unlock more core common cards. Note that none of these common core cards are minted on the blockchain and therefore you can’t sell them.

After playing several ranked battles, you gain “Flux” which you can use to combine identical cards to increase their quality and make them more valuable. Once re-forged, these cards can be stored within your wallet (Metamask) and sold to other players. In addition, you can earn small amounts of $GODS tokens and bonus packs by playing in the Weekend Ranked Tournaments.

Is the Gods Unchained Actually Good and Is It Play-to-Win?

Getting Started

The game can be fun to play for a little bit but requires a lot of grinding to get new cards and upgrade your rank so that you’re eligible for better prizes. You can of course buy more useful cards through the marketplace or by directly buying new packs rather than grinding to earn them. The 70 core cards (a total of 140 cards with duplicates) provided in the Welcome Set feature pre-made decks to get you started right away. By completing the tutorial, you can quickly get more cards and start battling other players. However, compared to cards from newer packs, most of the first cards you get will be quite weak.

The Basics

Each deck is themed around a specific God. You can only use cards that are aligned with that God or neutral in your deck. In total, each player has 40 cards in their deck; they are allowed to hold two duplicates at most of almost any card. The exception is Legendary-tiered cards which often come with powerful abilities. Each God can equip themselves with one of two specific powers that must be chosen at the start of the match.

There are three types of cards:

  1. Weapons are equipped to your God allowing you to attack an opponent or use another ability

  2. Creatures and Structures are summoned to protect your God’s health or damage your opponents. Each card comes from a different tribe that often relates to its effect; these do not necessarily determine which God the cards may serve but instead act as tags that you can use to theme a deck. Creatures also come with different effects and attributes – some of the most common include:

    • Afterlife: Effect comes into play after the creature dies

    • Ability: Some cards can’t attack but instead have a power you can use once per turn

    • Backline: Can’t be attacked unless everything else is destroyed first

    • Blitz: Can attack other creatures on the turn that it’s summoned

    • Deadly: Destroys another creature if it causes any damage

    • Frontline: This creature must be attacked and destroyed before anything else

    • Roar: an effect that is played immediately once the card is summoned

    • Flank: allows you to bypass frontline and backline effects

  3. Spells: come with a wide range of abilities

You start with three cards and draw an additional card at the start of each turn. If you’ve hit nine cards, you can’t draw anymore. Every time you take an action, you must spend mana. The amount of mana each player can access increases each turn. If you start first, you get one mana gem which helps you unlock mana sooner. If you start second, you are privy to three mana gems to help you in the match.

On your first turn, while you may summon creatures, you may not attack the other God. There is a lot of trial and error involved in learning how to play and how to best use different cards, so we suggest trying out the different pre-made decks. Briefly, remember how many turns it takes to unlock different amounts of mana. One gem just advances you a turn in terms of mana availability; that means that it is a waste to use a gem on say Turn 7 or Turn 9.

  • Turn 1: One mana available

  • Turn 2: Two mana available

  • Turn 3: Three mana available

  • Turn 4: Four mana available

  • Turn 5: Five mana available

  • Turn 6: Five mana available

  • Turn 7: Six mana available

  • Turn 8: Six mana available

  • Turn 9: Seven mana available

  • Turn 10: Seven mana available

  • Turn 11: Seven mana available

  • Turn 12: Eight mana available

  • Turn 13: Eight mana available

  • Turn 14: Eight mana available

  • Turn 15: Eight mana available

  • Turn 16: Nine mana available

When making your own deck, it is important you don’t have too many high-mana cards that can’t be played for a long time.

For example in a Nature deck, it is wise to allocate around 70-80% of your deck to creatures, ~10 to 20% to spells and the rest to weapons. But in a Magic deck, this ratio should ideally be weighted more towards spells than creatures.

Finally, each week has a ranked tournament that allows you to earn the GODS token and other prizes. However, this is being phased out at the moment in favour of daily rewards though it is unclear when these will be implemented.

Forging and Selling Cards

When you have duplicates of the same card, you can head to the Forge and fuse them into a higher-quality card that is then stored on the blockchain, which you may be able to sell (if there is a buyer).

Cards come in different qualities and rarities which determine the price. Rarity can be seen by the color of the diamond found on the side of the card. Grey is common, pale blue is rare, purple is epic and gold is legendary.

The qualities are reflected in the color of the card’s border. In order are Plain (grey border), Meteorite (red border), Shadow (purple border), Gold (gold border), Diamond (shiny border) and Mythic (even shinier with wings on the side of the card). Currently, there are issues with forging rare cards – so for now you can only forge two plain cards into one Meteorite.

Any cards that are Meteorite in quality or above (not Grey) can be sold as NFTs.

Can You Earn a Lot of Money Playing It?

At this point, no not really. After about a month of grinding to get a decent deck and some powerful cards in place, more than 10 GODS tokens in a week. The amount of GODS tokens you earn depends on your rank, how many players are also playing and how well they perform. This is the way that the rewards pool is distributed (though this may change in the near future):

  • Base weekly rewards pool = 100,000 $GODS reward pool

  • Rewards pool @ 50,000 weekly active players = 225,000 $GODS

  • Rewards pool @ 75,000 weekly active players = 350,000 $GODS

  • Rewards pool @ 100,000 weekly active players = 500,000 $GODS

  • $GODS rewards per week = (Your total points / Total points of all existing players) * $GODS rewards pool

Earning rewards requires playing 20 ranked games or more during the week to qualify (while winning 7 of them). It takes a substantial amount of time. Assuming the games are quick (5-6 minutes with a strong deck), it could take 2 hours to qualify and additional time to participate in the tournament for extra prizes.

I can make about 2 GODS ($6) for each hour I apply assuming the games are quick and efficient, with diminishing returns the longer I play.
– Simon

Also be aware that the $GODS token is volatile, fluctuating between around $2 and its high of $8.83 in 2021.

The game won’t make you rich but it’s an actual game that you might have fun playing – for me it got boring after a few weeks. I would give the game 3.5 stars overall as it’s functional and not just a vehicle for mining cryptocurrency.

Another perspective is from a 13-year-old kid:

If I can make 25 $GODS playing this game for 3 hrs a week, it works out to $50-75 per month to put towards a gaming laptop.

Takeaway

Gods Unchained is a trading card game hosted on the Immutable X blockchain with game mechanics like Hearthstone.

There’s an experienced game developer building it out but most of the cards you’ll start with (unless you purchase packs or more powerful cards) aren’t NFTs. The NFT cards that you get often can’t be sold for much and are not functional in other ecosystems yet.

While the blockchain mechanics aren’t particularly useful or necessary for the game, it is fun though nothing ground-breaking. Give it a try, though you’re very unlikely to make thousands of dollars playing it.

Don’t quit your day job. If you’re too young for a minimum wage day job, you coil always consider the more proven earning potential of babysitting or helping neighbors with yard work.