Trial of the Gods is the first set to be launched in Gods Unchained (GU) after the Genesis set was introduced in 2018. A little more than two years ago I wrote an article with advice on which card packs was worth buying for Genesis. For Genesis there were quite a bit of money to be saved on going after the right packs, and this article will try and do the same for Trial of the Gods.
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 individual, actual results will have a huge variance. Note that this is not an investment guide. I don’t know what the prices will be as that depends on a number of factors that are unknown at the moment. I will not give individual cards value, only talk about rarity and quality with regards to pricing.
Rarity and Quality
Before we start, if you are unfamiliar with the concepts of rarity and quality, you can read about that on the official Gods Unchained pages or in my previous article (which uses ‘shine’ as a name for quality).
Trial of the Gods: The Set
I will not delve too much in the details of the set, so for that you can check out the official announcement. Compared to Genesis this set is smaller, 150 cards vs 377, and broken down by rarity it looks like this:
- 60 Common
- 48 Rare
- 16 Epic
- 26 Legendary
Immediately one thing sticks out: the number of legendaries compared to epic. Comparing it to Genesis and Whispers of the Old Gods, which is a typical Hearthstone set, it becomes more clear.
Genesis had slightly more legendary compared to epic cards (60 vs 57), but the difference for Trial of the Gods is considerable. To compensate there are proportionally more common and legendary cards. This has significance because it’s not just the number of epic and legendary cards that is important, it’s how difficult it is to get a particular card. We’ll come back to that later.
Pack Types
We have the same pack types in Trial of the Gods as in Genesis:
- Rare: 4 common or better cards, and 1 rare or better
- Epic: 4 common or better cards, and 1 epic or better
- Legendary: 3 common or better cards, 1 rare or better, and 1 legendary
- Shiny Legendary: 3 common or better cards, 1 rare or better and 1 legendary. The legendary card is guaranteed to be of shadow or better quality, but the chance to get a diamond is unchanged.
In this set there is also a chance to tickets from each pack type. These tickets can be used to win prizes, such as a mythic card at a later date. I’ll comment on that at the end of the article.
The biggest difference with the pack types from Genesis is the pricing model: Genesis had fixed prices in Ether, while Trial of the Gods has fixed prices in USD.
Ether is still used to pay so the price is adjusted regularly, and for anyone who reduce their stack of Ether in order to buy packs, the price increase we saw in 2020 and beginning of 2021 makes a huge impact. For the Genesis it was the other way around with prices falling from around 500 USD at launch to below 100 USD in 2018. This is mostly a psychological difference, because I would hesitate to use cards as an investment and keep Ether and GU separate. If you consider any purchase in GU to be in addition to your Ether and not instead of, the pricing model in Trial of the Gods makes a lot of sense.
Genesis prices at different Ether intervals for comparison:
As you can see, the prices for a rare and legendary pack matches the price for when Genesis packs could be bought for around 200$ per Ether. Epic and shiny legendary packs are cheaper, as they should be, because as I mentioned in my article about Genesis, the prices on those, with the epic pack in particular, were terrible. One of the recommendations I had was to reduce the price of the epic pack to about half, which is what they have seemed to do, and it bodes well for making epic packs a viable buy.
Since the prices for Trial of the Gods are fixed in USD, I’ll use that going forward.
Rarity and Quality Probability
I found the contract for rarity probability on their public GitHub and have used that as a source. The numbers in that contract looks identical to that which was used for Genesis and this article from Gods Unchained also confirms the probability distribution I found.
I would have liked to be able to verify that in the actual contract on the Ethereum main net, as I did for Genesis, but it looks like that is not possible at the moment, which is a shame.
Rare Packs
Explained in a simple way, if you buy 20 rare packs, with 100 cards in total, the distribution below is the expected outcome:
I.e. 74 commons, 22 rare cards, 3 or 4 epic cards and 0 or 1 legendary. Of course this is on average. Buying 100 rare packs does not guarantee any particular outcome, it might be better, it might be worse.
The quality is also included in this table, and as you can see legendary diamonds are extremely rare, only appearing in 1 out of 100 000 cards from rare packs.
Epic Packs
For epic packs you get a high chance or epic cards instead of rare cards, at the cost of a higher price.
What I never liked about epic packs for Genesis is that you have the same chance of getting a legendary card as a rare pack, but at a much higher price, and it’s the same for epic packs in Trial of the Gods.
Legendary Packs
This pack type was the second best to buy for Genesis and the best buy for hunting legendaries. Below you will see that this is still the case for Trial of the Gods.
It’s worth noting that you’ll end up with a low amount of epic buying this pack type, so balance your purchases.
Shiny Legendary Packs
This is the most expensive pack, which guarantees you a shadow or a gold legendary card, but unfortunately the chance of a legendary diamond is unchanged compared to legendary packs.
Price Comparison
The most interesting part of this is the expected distribution adjusted for price of packs. In order to compare that I’ve compared how many cards you get of each rarity and quality for 1000 USD, for each pack type. The number of packs bought is listed in (parenthesis).
The color green is used to signal which pack type is the best for a combination of rarity and quality. The color red is used for the worst.
Highlights:
- Buy rare packs for most cards in any quality and for rare and common
- Buy epic packs to specifically get epic cards, but don’t buy more than you need as the amount of other types are low
- Buy legendary packs to specifically get legendary cards (also to get diamond legendary cards, but you are expected to only get one per 500 legendary pack, and there are no guarantees). You also get a fair amount of rare cards compares to epic packs, adjusted for value.
- Only buy shiny legendary for shadow and gold legendary cards. I would not recommend it unless you have a specific investment plan in mind.
Epic packs are actually viable compared to Genesis. I think they could be boosted a bit in the amount of legendaries you get, but it’s okay that these packs are focused towards getting epic cards.
How to Get the Most Unique Cards in the Set
Looking at expected distribution adjusted for price is one thing, but in order to see how it’s possible to get the most unique cards we also need to adjust for the number of unique cards of each rarity in the set. This becomes a variation of the Coupon Collector’s problem, which gives you the expected cards you need in order to have a complete collection:
The ratio is the most interesting number since that holds true even if we aim to get half the set or the whole. In order to get the most possible unique cards this ratio should be aimed for. We can compare these with the ratios for each pack from above:
There are no good matches between the ideal ratio and pack types. We can see that all pack types have too many common cards, and too few rare cards. This means that by the time we have all the rare cards we need, we will have a huge surplus of common cards. This is the way the set is created and nothing we can do to fix that. In order to balance this in the best way possible we need to ignore common cards, and aim for the best ratio between rare, epic and legendary packs.
The details in the calculation is a bit tricky to show so I’ll skip that and just present the result, adjusted to ignore common cards:
- 71% Rare Packs
- 11% Epic Packs
- 18% Legendary Packs
Very simplified: For each 7 rare pack you should roughly buy one epic pack and 2 legendary pack in order to get the most unique rare, epic and legendary cards. If you plan to buy a bunch you should stick to the percentages if possible.
It will not necessarily give you most value, or the most cards of any given rarity. It will also give you a surplus of common cards, but that is unavoidable.
Conclusions
Depending on your preference, the different packs offer different possibilities. I would point out some purchase strategies based on that. I would also like to comment that I wish the set was a bit more balanced in terms of unique cards, with more unique commons and a more equal share of epic and legendary cards. A good distribution is important for a balanced market.
If you want most of the cards in the set before the trading starts, but isn’t interested in getting more duplicates than necessary:
Buy in this ratio: 71% rare packs, 11% epic packs, 18% legendary packs. Simplified rule: 1 epic and 2 legendary for each 7 rare packs.
I would estimate that 500–1000 USD would go far towards getting a sizable Trial of the Gods Collection.
If you want the complete set before trading:
Buy in the ratio above, but be aware that this is going to be costly, and it’s better to aim for 75–90% of the set and buying the rest from the market.
People often spent 40 Ether or more to get the 377 Genesis cards and I would guess that 70–80% of the amount spent was used to get the last 10% epic and legendary cards. Even if Trial of the Gods is a smaller set it will still be expensive. A wild estimate following a optimal strategy would be 4000 USD, but if you are unlucky you spend far more than that.
Cheapest way to get all the cards or specific cards:
Buy on the open marked once it opens! With IMX going online soon the way cards are sold and bought will change. Using the open market is usually the economically sensible strategy, but it is fun to open packs and sometimes you do get lucky.
What about chests?
I really like the concept of chests, that the cards can be created long after the sale of the set has ended. It’s a little bit more expensive so doing so would be for investment purposes only, or as gifts. Stick with normal packs if you just want the cards.
How to buy Trial of the Gods Cards?
Buy here from the official site. I’ve included my referral in the link. Feel free to remove if you don’t want.
If you haven’t signed up you can do that here. If you complete the in-game mission you get 20 USD. I get 5 USD. Feel free to skip if you don’t want.
A Final Comment on Tickets
I haven’t focused too much on tickets so far, but tickets do add an added incentive to buying packs instead of waiting for the trading of Trial of the Gods cards to start.
If we adjust those numbers for pack price we get the following outcome for expected tickets for each USD spent:
Immutable has been quite good of balancing the number of tickets, though personally I wouldn’t have minded if they skewed it towards the more expensive pack types. Getting more tickets by buying more expensive pack types would give some additional incentive for buying them. Epic packs is isolated slightly better than the others, and rare packs are the worst, but to me it’s not significant enough to prefer one over the other.
