The second expansion of Gods Unchained has arrived. As I’ve done with Genesis and the first expansion, I’ve have made a purchase guide for this set. My focus is getting your moneys worth out of the packs you are buying. In these articles I ignore the worth of specific cards as that’s heavily dependent on marked fluctuations and instead I focus on rarity and quality.
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Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with Gods Unchained, nor have I been contracted to write an article. I have bought cards so I do have an interest in this game. Below I display probabilities and expected results, but actual outcome for each buyer will have a huge variance. Note that this is not an investment guide.
TLTR
In case you are not interested in the details of this article I’ve made a simple summary. This is not a guide about the powers or price expectations of individual cards. Instead this is the advice I have for purchasing packs:
For each legendary pack you should buy 3 rare packs and 2 epic packs in order to complete the set cost-efficiently.
At some point it will be easier to sell surplus cards and purchasing the ones you need on the marketplace, instead of chasing a few elusive cards. In fact, just using the marketplace might be the best bet, but for those who like the gamble of opening packs, consider using the purchase ratio above.
Due to the limited discount period and the mythic promo drop chance you should first buy legendary packs. Rare and epic packs gives the best drop rates for the promo cards. Also, buy your packs before the discount ends.
I’m mostly ignoring quality (shadow, gold, diamond) in that statement, but in terms of quality drop rate it’s still valid advice. Shiny legendary pack is an exception, but that’s a very expensive and specific pack type that I would generally avoid unless you have a specific goal in mind.
I’ll go into the details behind those statements in the rest of the article. You can purchase packs using this link (includes referral).
Divine Order: The Set
From the official announcement we can see that in total there are 194 collectable cards, broken down by rarity as follows:
- 79 Commons
- 57 Rares
- 32 Epics
- 26 Legendaries
In addition there are 1 unique mythic card (only one copy exists), and 6 promo cards, which you’ll receive instead if the mythic has already been discovered.
The concept of promo cards is new, since Trial of Gods had a mythic Raffle, and in Genesis you got a legendary card if the mythic was found. I really like that concept as it gives you something a bit more unique when you otherwise would have be eligible for a mythic card. I tend to avoid commenting on individual cards, but I like that they are 1 mana, and could fit into a broad range of decks. The War and Light cards are a bit weak, but the rest seems to be of some use. More importantly, they will be hard to get. The best of these promo cards will not be cheap to get on the marked, especially if found in a quality higher than meteorite.
I want to expand a bit on the rarity distribution, as I did with Trial of Gods to see how it compares. As I mentioned in that article, the amount of epic cards compared to legendary cards was quite skewed, with a high number of legendary cards, making a single copy of a legendary card comparably more difficult to get. However In Divine Order, the distribution is more what you’d expect, more so than Genesis as well, with fewer legendary cards than epics.
I like this, and it bodes well for epic packs. A single copy will be harder to get, retain more value, and it makes more sense to buy epic packs in order to get epic cards (which hasn’t always been the case).
Pack Types
The set has the same pack types as Trial of Gods and Genesis, with two small, but important differences, highlighted in bold below:
- Rare: 4 common or better cards, and 1 rare or better
- Epic: 3 common or better cards, 1 rare or better and 1 epic or better
- Legendary: 3 common or better cards, 1 rare or better, and 1 legendary
- Shiny Legendary: 2 Common cards or better, 1 Rare card or better, 1 Shiny Common card or better, 1 Shiny Legendary card
The prices are the same as for Trial of Gods, fixed in USD:
The last new aspect of the set is that this is the first set not to have a hard limit. It’s unknown when it ends, since it’s set at Immutable’s discretion. How that will play out in terms of total sales is hard to guess, but there is a 20% discount that will decrease linearly towards 6 MUSD sold.
Rarity and Quality Probability
I’ve based the probability on what was listed in the official announcement. I much preferred to be able to see this on the blockchain smart contract, which was possible with Genesis, but understand that it’s not quite that simple with IMX. I’ve yet to confirm the Divine Order probability on code from their GitHub repository, as Divine Order hasn’t been published there yet, but I did that for Trial of Gods and it matched, so I expect the numbers to be accurate.
The drop rates for slots are the same as for Trial of Gods so that makes me believe the numbers. The mythic/promo drop rate is very interesting, since they are listed as drop rate PER pack, indicating that you’ll have a certain chance to get ONE for each pack (not per card which was used for genesis). This is also confirmed by the probabilities listed for each card slot. In Genesis the chance for Mythic was 0.000001 and 0.001654 for legendary, in the common slot. In Divine order it’s 0.001655 (which is the sum of those from Genesis).
The numbers listed above isn’t so easy to attribute value to, but using this along with pack price and rarity distribution it’s possible to break down the numbers into something more useful.
Below are the expected distribution for each pack type, for 100 cards (20 packs). As the mythic/promo drop rate is outside of this probability scope they are not shown here, but I’ll go into more details on those later.
The big change compared to Trial of Gods is that you now get a rare card from epic packs. Compare the numbers above to the previous expansion:
Then there is the change to Shiny legendary packs (from ToG below):
As you can see there is a huge increase in common shadow and gold drop rates. Basically you’ll get more shiny cards for the same price. The diamond drop rate does not increase with Shiny legendary packs, which is good, to keep the drop rates of the highest quality down.
Price Comparison
Drop rates per pack is all well and good, but we need to compare it with prices in order to understand what’s worth buying. For this exercise I’ve simulated the expected outcome if I spent 1000 USD on each pack type:
I’ll use these numbers in my conclusions later. In terms of best/worst buy (green and red) nothing has changed. Each pack type is the best value for money for its rarity (rare packs for common/rare, epic packs for epic cards and legendary packs for legendary cards). But there are two changes in numbers:
Epic pack
As you can see you get fewer common cards, but for rare cards epic packs give you significantly more than it did previously, and you’ll get on average a bit more legendary and epic cards as well. This is a pretty good deal for this set.
Shiny Legendary Pack
You get more shadow cards and gold cards (mostly common though), but it’s still a pretty bad deal unless you specifically want shadow and gold legendaries. I hope they improve the Shiny legendary pack in the next expansion. They could make all cards shiny in the pack and it still would only be half-decent:
It’s the most expensive pack so it shouldn’t overshadow (pun intended) all the other packs, but with its current price tag they could put a bit more value into it. I think they could even throw in a guaranteed epic card, call it Shiny Pack, and it would still be okay. It’s the legendary card that gives it the most value anyway, the rest isn’t worth that much by comparison (IMX token airdrop did boost the shadow legendary prices though, so maybe it wasn’t that terrible).
How to Get the Most Unique Cards in the Set
If the drop rates are mostly unchanged and the prices are the same is the purchase tactic the same as for Trial of Gods? Not quite. As mentioned at the start of the article, the rarity distribution has changed, and that has an important impact.
There are more cards in the set. More common and rare. Double the amount of epic cards, while the number of legendaries remain the same. All this affect the purchase tactic. I’ve explained parts of the process behind this in the previous article, so I’ll just skip some of the number crunching and go through a simplified estimate:
Since there are more cards, you need to buy a lot more packs than in Trial of Gods to get the cards you need. It’s increased by almost 40%. The ratio of common cards you need are roughly the same, but the amount of epic cards you need has doubled, which makes epic packs very useful compared to Trial of Gods. This was one of the critiques I had with Trial of Gods, so I’m happy to see that they have balanced that out a bit better.
Now we can compare that card ratio with the ratio of cards we get from each pack type, from the previous section (ignoring the Shiny pack type since it’s not useful for this purpose):
Even the legendary pack gives us 55% common cards, which is more than we need compared to the ratio of 47%, so we are gong to end up with a lot of surplus common cards. It’s basically the same as for Trial of Gods. This is an important point from a collectors standpoint as the marked will be overflowing with commons. This means we can basically ignore common cards and focus on the best ratio between rare, epic and legendary cards:
Just buying legendary or epic packs isn’t enough to get the rare cards you need (46.7% vs 61.49%), so rare packs are necessary. Epic packs are even more important than rare packs as it’s the only pack you’ll get a significant amount of epic cards from, and has improved by a lot since Trial of Gods.
The ratio between pack type that matches the ratio you need to get the most unique cards becomes:
Of course, using bigger numbers will give more precise results, but it’s more relevant to use smaller numbers and approximations since most people will not spend many thousand USD on each set. The purchase ratio of this set is far more balanced than in the previous one, so I am mostly happy with this.
This works under the assumption that you want to get a distribution that matches the distribution of the set, since we have established that each pack type is the best value for money for its rarity. Buying rare packs gives you a lot of cards, but you are never going to get the legendary cards you want. If you don’t care about legendary cards, the optimal ratio would be different.
Conclusions
Use the following guideline to get the optimal distribution:
For each legendary pack you should buy 3 rare packs and 2 epic packs in order to complete the set cost-efficiently.
There is a disclaimer here. As you buy, your collection is not going to follow the perfect distribution, but in the long term this is what the distribution should be, and you can always use the information listed here to adjust accordingly. If you are after a specific rarity/quality you can use the tables adjusted for price to guide you towards the correct pack type.
IMX is up and running, which was not the case for Trial of the Gods, for the most part, so using that to sell surplus and buy missing cards is a huge benefit in order to minimize cost. The cards will be tradable before they are finally balanced, so you could use that to your advantage. An obvious candidate for a nerf might be sold for a good price, but there are no guarantees though, so be cautious.
There are two other factors that might influence your purchase strategy:
- 20% discount that is slowly reduced to 0%
- Mythic and promo cards
I will comment on both in the next section as that has some interesting effects on how you plan your purchases.
Regarding Mythic and Promo
As I’ve mentioned earlier, I wanted to spend a little bit of time on these two card types. Mythic is as always a unique card, with only 1 copy ever minted. Promo cards are replacement cards for when the Mythic is opened by someone.
I’ll repeat the drop rates:
Now, the various chances doesn’t mean much unless we compare it to the pack prices:
I find these numbers very interesting. The first thing is the probabilities for getting a mythic is low, as it should be. The mythic drop rate increases a bit with the more expensive pack types, as it should be. In Genesis it was literally 1 in a million chance of getting a mythic, but for this set it looks like 1 in 2.5 million, based on the probabilities of rare packs, though you get 10% better chances, adjusted for value, by buying legendary packs (shiny legendary cards are slightly better, but as seen earlier it’s a pack type with a very specific focus). This is a good strategy from Immutable as it will keep the sales up, unless someone is very lucky and gets it early, but even with rare pack the cost of getting an expected value of 1 mythic is 1 245 000 USD, significant below the 6 MUSD discount limit.
Now the second interesting thing is the Promo drop rates. Once the mythic is found you have a chance of getting a promo card, but the drop rate increases. It’s 1 in every 10 000 pack on average, regardless of pack type and price, which I find really odd, as it doesn’t incentivize more expensive packs. There is one exception, epic packs have a 1/3333 pack drop rate. Even adjusted for price, epic packs are better than rare! I suspect that is because the promo cards are of epic rarity, and they wanted some correlation. If the promo cards are something to chase in terms of total pack value, legendary packs are at an disadvantage after the mythic has been found. It remains to be seen if the promo cards are enough to generate much sales after the discount period ends.
In light of all of this I would try to plan how much I want to spend on this set in advance, and then spent it all at once to take advantage of the discount and the chance to get the mythic card, and I would do it in this order:
- First buy the legendary packs you want to buy since they have the highest probability of finding the mythic (ignoring the shiny pack type). This is your ticket to get the mythic. Also the more you spend early the more advantage you get out of the discount.
- Second buy the rare packs you want to buy, which according to this purchase strategy is 3times the legendary packs you bought. They give you a good drop rate on the promo cards, adjusted for value, so purchasing these after the mythic has been found is a solid choice as well.
- After the mythic is found, prioritize your epic packs (along with rare), which is 2 times the legendary packs you bought, in order to have the highest drop rate for promo cards. It’s okay to buy epic packs before the mythic is found, but I would be prefer using my money on legendary packs until then.
For example if you decide to get 50 legendary packs, 100 epic packs and 150 rare packs (which follows the 1:2:3 ratio) you will get:
Now, this is a lot of money to spend, 2322 USD to be exact, but it’s easier to use big numbers because of the low drop rates involved. I’d also like to point out that for this set you should spend most of the money you want to put in on legendary packs, and to do so before the mythic is found. The 2322 USD is spent as follows:
- 1249.5 USD on legendary packs (another reason for buying this at once)
- 699 USD on epic packs
- 373.5 USD on rare packs
The expected drop rate towards mythic is 0.16 percentage points for legendary and rare packs (far better than it was Genesis). The epic packs could add an additional 0.06 percentage points, but I would rather spend those on getting promo cards. 100 epic packs should net you 0.03 promo cards, so these are extremely rare as well.
Few people will spend more than this, and most far less, but this gives you an indication of how difficult it is to get cards of a certain rarity and quality, so appreciate it when it happens. That’s one of the exciting things about opening packs. As you can see you are only expected to get about 2 diamond commons, and 1 diamond or a higher rarity (most likely a rare).
After the sale has ended, I wouldn’t buy more packs, as you are at an cost/value disadvantage compared to those that bought earlier. Use the market place to get the cards you need. If you suspect that it’s cheaper to pick up rare cards on the market (for example if most people overestimate rare packs, not following the 1:2:3 ratio, and the marked is flooded with them), an alternative strategy for this set could be to just spent all an epic and legendary packs. If so I would still follow the 1:2 ratio between legendary and epic packs, and you should be prepare to be low on rare cards compared to the other types, but that’s pure speculation on my part.
About Treasure Chests
As I’ve mentioned in my previous articles I really like the concept of treasure chests. It’s like selling unopened booster packs. That said, treasure chests are more an investment than anything else, so it’s impossible to guess, but the chests of Trial of Gods seems to have been a decent buy.
An additional comment on rare chests. Since I assume promo cards are possible to get from treasure chests also after the sale of Divine Order has ended, and rare and legendary packs have the same drop rate, that favors the rare chests.
Final Note
I hope this is of some value to people who are at a loss of what to aim for among the different pack types they can buy.
Feel free to contact me for any questions or comments. I am happy to write these articles for my own benefit, but for anyone who wants to give a tip, please use the following Ethereum address: 0x9f931649890fAdeEF7BACbdE92B0c141658efCC7
Edit: @chrome from the GU discord pointed out a decimal error with mythic and promo probabilities. That has now been fixed.
Edit: @PiSqueeze and DarkSlash from GU discord noted that I had missed that epic packs now include a rare instead of a common. That has now been fixed.
