The final major expansion set of Season 1: Champions Rise is out and I’ll go through the stats about the set, and make some recommendation for what pack types are best buys. As normal, my focus is getting the most unique cards for the least amount of money. I will not talk about specific cards in the set as there are better sources for that, and prices on those will fluctuate wile the set is in balance phase and the meta changes.
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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.
Highlights
- There are few changes compared to Divine Order
- Marketplace likely continue to be the best bet to get all meteorite cards for the least amount spent
- You can buy packs with multiple currencies supported on ImmutableX (ETH, IMX, GODS, USDC)
- Epic packs contains 2 epic cards instead of 1 epic and 1 rare from DO
- Set contain proportionally less epic cards and more legendary and rare cards than DO
- A recommended buy ratio of packs is: 12 rare packs and 2 legendary packs for each epic pack (in other words: they could have done a better job on epic for this set)
- The probabilities for mythic (which also influence when promo cards can be found) are 1/5th of what is was for DO. It is however expected that it will be found before the 10 MUSD discount limit is reached.
Preface
The easiest way to get the set is to just buy it on the marketplace, and since this is the last set this year it will be for sale for a long time (unless Gods Unchained go back on previous statements), and prices will devaluate as long as the player base doesn’t increase drastically. Stay away from shiny cards since they are often overvalued on the marketplace when the set is new.
On the other hand opening packs is fun, and sometimes you get that shiny card you wouldn’t have considered buying on the marketplace, and maybe you want to get a bunch of cards from packs without getting too many duplicates. This is what this guide is for.
Mortal Judgement: The Set
From the official announcement we can see that in total there are 197 collectable cards, broken down by rarity as follows:
- 80 Commons
- 64 Rares
- 23 Epics
- 30 Legendaries
In addition there are 1 unique mythic card (only one copy exists), and 1 promo card, which you’ll receive instead if the mythic has already been discovered. This is a continuation of they way the did it for Divine Order, which I liked, as it gives a chance for a special prize after the mythic is found.
Mortal Judgement seems closer to Trial of the Gods in terms of distribution, with fewer epic cards and more legendary cards:
Divine Order was a pretty balanced set in terms of rarity distribution, but for Mortal Judgement I’m not a huge fan of reducing the number of epics compared to legendaries. There are also slightly more rare than in Divine Order, so that should count in favour of rare packs.
However, rarity distribution isn’t everything, what you get for your money is heavily influenced by pack content and prices.
Pack Types and Content
The set has the same pack types as we know from before, with the differences in content highlighted in bold below:
- Rare: 4 common (or better cards), and 1 rare (or better)
- Epic: 3 common (or better cards), 2 epic (or better)
- Legendary: 3 common (or better cards), 1 rare (or better), and 1 legendary
- Shiny Legendary: 1 Shadow, Gold or Diamond common card (or better), 2 Common cards (or better), 1 Rare card (or better), 1 Shadow, Gold or Diamond Legendary card
The prices are the same as the two last sets, fixed in USD, and only time limited (will be available for a long time though):
As we can see, now we get two epics in each epic pack, but combined with the fact that there are fewer epic cards that seems odd. Don’t get me wrong epic packs gives at first glance better value than DO, but buy too many end you’ll end up with a lot of duplicates, and it might not be the ones you wanted anyway. This will also impact the marketplace, and epic card prices may not hold up so well as with Divine Order.
Rarity and Quality Probability
As with anything minted on ImmutableX we have to trust the probabilities listed, as we can’t verify it. But the numbers haven’t changed (except for the mythic changes) so it should be as trustworthy as it gets without seeing it in a smart contract like for the Genesis set. You can find the numbers listed at the official blog.
Buying 25 packs of each type (100 cards) give you the following expected distribution (actual numbers will wary, change from Divine Order highlighted in red):
Price Comparison
Distribution isn’t everything. In order to understand the true value of packs we need to look at the drop rates and adjust it for price.
As always, green is the best, and red is the worst (epic is worst at legendary diamonds, but the difference is too small to show here):
Nothing really changed here from Divine Order. Epic packs are even better at epic cards, but far worse at rare cards compared to Divine Order.
The tables above is useful if there are certain combination of rarity and quality you are looking for. As with Mortal Judgement the pack types fit their role far better than for Genesis (Trial of the Gods was not so bad either), and we know that each pack type is the most cost efficient for its type.
About Shiny Packs
I still think they should change the Shiny Legendary Packs, as it is for the most part a badly designed pack. They could make all cards in that pack shiny for that price tag (Diamond would still be at 0.2% chance of course), and include an epic for good measure:
- 2 common cards (or better), guaranteed shadow (75%) or gold (25%)
- 1 rare card (or better), guaranteed shadow (75%) or gold (25%)
- 1 epic card (or better), guaranteed shadow (75%) or gold (25%)
- 1 legendary card (or better), guaranteed shadow (75%) or gold (25%)
Even that wouldn’t impact the market much beyond what it does now, since the regular packs give better drop rates for each type except legendary, but at least it wouldn’t be the worst when it comes to shadow and gold for common, rare and epic:
The shiny boost of common and rare doesn’t really make it worth it, it just looks better that way when opening, but the addition of the shiny epic would make it a more balanced deal.
How to Get the Most Unique Cards in the Set
Getting the most epic and legendaries for your money isn’t the only considerations. You’d also like to avoid getting to many duplicates, since you don’t really need a lot of extra copies of all those cards that are almost never playable. So you also need to compare the drop rates above with the rarity distribution in the set, which we already saw includes fewer epic cards, and then of course we already know that each pack type is the most cost efficient for its rarity.
I’ll use the same method I used for Divine Order. It’s not 100% accurate, but it’s more than enough to consider if you should get that epic pack or just buy a a few rare packs for the same price.
As always we can ignore common cards when considering getting the best ratio, since it’s unavoidable that you’ll get more than you need:
Compared to Divine Order:
So about the same for legendary (a bit of a surprise to me), but for Mortal Judgement you’ll want more rare cards, and less epic cards (which was not a surprise).
The closest reasonable ratio I found between packs was the following:
For each epic pack you buy, you should get 2 legendary packs and 12 rare packs in order to minimize the probabilities of duplicate rare, epics and legendaries.
Compared to Divine Order:
As you can see Divine Order was a very balanced set in terms of rarity distribution and pack content, while for Mortal Judgement they have almost made Epic packs irrelevant, and rare packs the default (as it was for Genesis). Of course since you have to buy that many rare packs to get the rare cards you need, you’ll also end up with far more common duplicates than you got from Divine Order.
As always, the easiest way to avoid duplicates is to use the marketplace, and after buying some packs I highly recommend using the marketplace to buy the remaining cards you need since getting those last ones become increasingly expensive.
Discount
You have the same discount as with Divine Order, but instead of stopping at 6 MUSD, it stops at 10 MUSD, so the discount lasts for longer, which is good.
You can also pay in various currencies, and it’s also worth considering if ETH and other currencies will increase more in value in time, so that the discount becomes irrelevant. Of course, it can easily go the other way, so that’s up to each player to consider.
Mythic and Promo
Finally, I’d like to mention a bit about the probabilities surrounding the mythic card in the set, and the promo card you’ll get if the mythic is found. I will not go into as much detail as I did for Divine Order, but after all there is an element of gambling, especially in the beginning where you buy packs at the biggest discount in the hopes of finding that mythic.
Some considerations about this set:
The drop rates of the mythic pre 10 MUSD is considerably lower than for Divine Order. 1/5th in fact and even after the 10 MUSD limit the probability is still half of what is was for Divine Order to begin with. They really don’t want that mythic to be found early! This is an improvement in terms of sales strategy, as I mentioned for Divine Order is was very probable that the mythic would be found early in the discount phase, which both affected the numbers of promo cards found later on and continued interest in buying packs after the mythic was found.
Shiny packs still give you the best chances for your money, but only slightly compared to the rest, so I wouldn’t factor that too much into your decision, and it’s better to stick with the ratio presented above, or whatever you fancy the most. By 10 MUSD it likely that the mythic will found, so there is not so much point in waiting for the drop rates to increase either, especially the chances are so small that buying lots of packs to get the mythic is not a valid strategy.
As for Promo drop rates they are the same as for Divine Order, which is a bit strange since it made sense for epic packs to have a higher chance since the rats were epics, while in Mortal Judgement the promo card is a legendary.
There are a couple of considerations for the promo card:
- We know that the mythic is going to be found much later than for Divine Order (probably), so that will reduce the amount of promo cards found.
- We also know that epic packs should be less popular than for Divine Order, so that should also reduce the amount of promo cards.
And then of course there are no guarantees that the 10 MUSD limit will be reached, or that the mythic will be found very late. In other words, there are good chances that the promo card will be more valuable than what they were for Divine Order. On the other hand there were one rat for each god, so there will be fewer promo cards in total, but maybe not if you consider each individual Divine Order promo card.
Finally, I’d like to emphasize again that this is not financial advice, it’s mostly playing around with the probabilities to see if some pack types are more attractive than others.
