The above banner image was generated using Night Cafe AI and cobbled together from in game screenshots from Gods Unchained. I do not own these gifs. And you can find them here, here, here, and here. where they are free to use.
Shine on: What is the shine meta?
Greetings everyone and welcome to another post about Gods Unchained. In this post we will be discussing Shine dp2e, how it effects the meta, and how it's changed over time. For a long time shining up cards was MOSTLY aesthetic and rank mattered the most. During this time a lot of bot farms were churning into each other at lower ranks. To combat this GU reduced earnings for the first 7 ranks and increased the value of having a shiney deck (I forget which was first but both were implemented around roughly if not the same time if I recall). They also cracked down on bots and it reduced overall bot activity throughout GU
The Good: It Thinned Bots
The reward pool at least (hopefully) is going moreso to real players than it was in the past before the dp2e changes. Floors of cards are inclined to be purchased and cards rented for dp2e, BUT as I've found in my experience what matters the most is how SHINEY your deck is compared to anything (even rank). And now many decks are opting for worse shiney cards in place of strong lower print options for better dp2e (my deck is among them). This meta shift has created a thinned competitive environment that was already deteriorating with a lack of leaderboard incentives etc.
The Bad: It Thinned Competition
The decks you encounter in ranked now can be a bit wonky or whaley or rented, but most of what you are seeing is shiney and or a tuned meta meteorite list. Nothing in between. It's easy to que up a meta list but these become expensive to have shiney or in some cases impossible to do so. This has effected what people run, the full diamond boost is serious business and some cards in the game CANNOT be in diamond for your list. The game has become much less competitive and is mostly about piloting shiney ANYTHING decks in solar gold+
A Perfect Medium? Who knows
This meta does give value to shiney cards which is an overall pro, but devaluing competition and the best decks rising to the top of the ranks is a huge con here. Also bots being removed from the picture is an overall good thing giving out the dp2e pool to real players, but now playing shiney decks over and over and over and over for dp2e is starting to be a bit of a burnout also. Maybe I should start renting? Who knows. I think there needs to be more incentives to be "the best" at the game on leaderboard, but it's very difficult to discern what should be there to incentivize players to achieve said positions. Weekend ranked rewards are work next to nothing (even for top 10 etc.) so dp2e is focused upon, and the shiniest deck you can get to at least tread water in solar gold and above. Nothing else matters. I have mixed feelings about how the meta is/works myself. I think there needs to be more competitive elements to the game etc. in general. But what do you all think? What do you like/what would you change? Let me know in the comments wherever you find this. I'll see you all on Eucos running shiney shiney shiney cards, regardless of the W/R.
Talking Tidbits: My Takeaway
I personally have become a bit burned out grinding out the same shiney deck everyday for weeks, even though I've "ROIed" or whatever my fun has been drained from my body as if by some vampiric force. Months of the same deck and being decentivized to play anything that isn't a diamond has definitely had a toll on the fun factor for me. I used to homebrew and play all kinds of crazy things and try to put them onto the leaderboard, there isn't a point for me to do that now and in fact would be less progression in game than what I'm currently doing. Daily 10 feels like a chore to get over with to start actually playing the game for fun, it always did but it certainly feels exacerbated these days. Day in day out, Shine shine shine. What do you folks think about it? Do you like it? Are you also feeling the burn?
