How You Get Them And What You Should Spend Them On
In This Post:
- Introduction
- Open Vs. Closed Economy
- $GOG
- Rubies
- Gold
- Guild Coins
- Arena Coins
- Rush Coins
- Endless Coins
- Dungeon Coins
- Conclusion
Introduction
Hi folks! Welcome back to my blog, GameFi Nexus.
In this post, I want to explore a question I see a lot in the Guild of Guardians forums.
New players often ask what they should do with the different currencies in the game.
I get why! GoG packs MANY different kinds, and it’s not always clear whether what you’re buying with them is worth it when you’re just starting out.
Using all of your rewards is important to establish yourself in the game early, however. Collecting these in-game coins gives you access to important power-ups to beef up your squad.
In this article, I’ll break each one down to help you navigate through it all.
I’ll cover what each one is used for, how you can get more of it, and what you should consider spending it on first.
Let’s get started!
Open Vs. Closed Economy
As gamers, we’ve all been taught to collect some form of item in exchange for an in-game advantage.
Grabbing mushrooms to super-size your plumber…collecting rupies to buy power ups…hoarding Gil to buy weapons and materia…
Games have used closed economies — where currencies only have value in the game — from the very dawn of gaming!
GoG is no different, and it uses quite a few in-game currencies to help you improve your account. Not only that, but GoG also features an open economy!
In an open economy, money circulates to the players as opposed to only the game’s publisher.
You can own and trade digital assets on third-party marketplaces using digital currencies.
Most Web3 game publishers also reward players with a their own digital currency to keep players engaged and active in their ecosystem.
This is where the expression “play2earn” stems from. You can now collect assets with real-world value and either re-invest them in the game or sell them to others for other assets.
Let’s start by reviewing Guild of Guardian’s open economy token, $GOG.
$GOG
$GOG is a Cryptocurrency token first issued on the IMX blockchain. It was later migrated to Immutable zkEVM (I-zkEVM) — the network that powers Guild of Guardians.
You can use $GOG to:
- Craft items at the Altar of Sacrifice
- Participate in active staking (not available yet)
- Trade goods on the secondary marketplace
- Convert (mint) in-game assets into on-chain assets that you own
Since $GOG is a cryptocurrency token, you can also hold it, trade it or sell it at a later date.
How Do You Get $GOG?
You can purchase $GOG on a few large centralized exchanges (CEX).
That said, your ability to access these exchanges will vary depending on your jurisdiction. I, myself, can’t access any of the ones listed above in Canada.
In my case, using a decentralized exchange (DEX) is the best option.
Sushiswap is the most reliable DEX listed above to trade on Ethereum, but why pay expensive gas fees when it costs virtually nothing to trade on Immutable zkEVM.
There are three main DEX on i-zkEVM:
- Quickswap: https://quickswap.exchange/#/
- Layerswap: https://www.layerswap.io/
- Warpgate: https://warpgate.pro/
The hard part is figuring out how to move your money to the right places. If you need help with that, check out my post on the cheapest ways to onboard to I-zkEVM.
Aside from purchasing it on the market, you can also earn $GOG by:
- Selling gaming assets on the secondary market
- Ranking high on the game’s various in-game leaderboards
- Participating in active staking when it becomes available.
We’re still waiting for details on those last two.
The team still hasn’t confirmed how leaderboard rewards will be distributed now that the play2airdrop launch event is over.
The team also announced during the last townhall that active staking would be delayed while they rebuild the feature on I-zkEVM.
If you’d like to learn more about past active staking rounds, check out this post I wrote about community rewards.
What Should You Do With It?
You’ll need $GOG if you intend to get the most out of this game.
Crafting recipes for the Altar of Sacrifice will require $GOG, and rewards from the active staking program will probably depend on how much you hold.
I’m holding on to as much $GOG as I can in anticipation, and I use other Cryptocurrencies to trade like $ETH, $IMX and $USDC whenever I can.
That said, you can purchase assets on TokenTrove from other players using your $GOG.
The team also re-opened Eri’s Store to sell Ascension Seals for $GOG.
If you’re just starting out in Web3 and only have $GOG tokens you earned from the game, it makes sense to use them to take advantage of deals like these.
I still encourage you to learn more about crypto and Web3, however, to take advantage of the game’s upcoming features.
If you’re sitting on a bag of $GOG, you may want to consider growing it passively by providing liquidity on one of the DEXs I mentioned earlier.
It’s a good way to generate rewards with your capital, but you need to understand the risks first!
If you’d like to learn more about crypto and decentralized finance, I highly recommend the team at CryptoLabs Research.
Lucas, Colin and the gang have been in the decentralized finance (DeFi) space for a long time, and they run a great community that can teach you all about it.
I’ve been a member of their community for over a year, and I’ve learned a lot about how to navigate the crypto landscape from them.
Here’s a link to their YouTube channel if you want to check them out: https://www.youtube.com/@CryptolabsResearch
Rubies
Rubies are the main in-game currency in GoG. You use them for a number of different things like:
- Purchasing adventure energy points
- Purchasing crafting energy
- Purchasing gold
- Purchasing additional tries on Arena, Endless and Boss Rush
- Summoning Guardians when you run out of summoning stones
- Purchasing items in the main in-game shop
- Purchasing consumable items from merchant shops you encounter in Dungeons
- Resetting your name
- Donating to your guild for Guild tokens and merit
That’s a lot of stuff! So, you’ll end up using them daily if you want to keep up with other players on the game’s leaderboards.
How Do You Get Rubies?
Rubies are essential to help speed up your progress through the game — making it easy to burn through your reserve.
Luckily, they’re relatively easy to get. You can collect additional rubies by:
- Completing beginner quests
- Completing daily quests
- Earning them on the Endless reward board
- Purchasing them for fiat in the shop
- Reading help menus
- Completing Adventure missions
- Participating in community events
- Ranking on Endless, Boss Rush and Arena leaderboards
- Referring friends to the game
What Should You Do With Them?
The best way to spend your rubies when you’re just starting out is on crafting energy.
You can replenish your crafting energy up to 10 times a day for 170 rubies in total.
You earn 30 Commander XP every time you create a crafting material, and it costs 3 crafting energy to do so. You get 30 crafting energy per refill, so you can rack up a lot of Commander XP each day.
Raising your Commander level early will increase the level cap of your Guardians, making them stronger and letting you progress faster early on.
There are two logical choices after you buy up crafting energy refills.
The first is to purchase extra adventure energy to clear as many challenge rooms as you can every day. Buying them all will set you back 660 rubies.
Challenge room rewards include gold, power stones, scrolls, and Guardian shards — all the basic things you need to power up your squad.
The second choice is to purchase the additional 3rd and 4th Endless tickets for 300 and 500 rubies, respectively.
Purchasing those extra tickets will let you achieve better scores and get better rewards.
I highly recommend you purchase an energy booster if you’re thinking of spending on GoG. Holding the item in your lets you claim the first ticket for free, saving you 300 rubies every day.
You can read more about it in my starter’s guide.
I also like to purchase weekly summoning stones and Guardian shards in the shop with any extra rubies I have left. Both items let you summon extra Guardians that you can use to improve your roster.
Purchasing all of the above will cost you 1,630 rubies daily, and roughly 13K rubies weekly. So, it’s unlikely you’ll have enough rubies left over unless you purchase rubies from the shop.
That’s why I never grab any consumables from merchant shops. I can easily farm them, and I find better value to save my rubies for crafting or Adventure energy instead.
Gold
From here on in, things get a lot simpler. The remaining currencies have way fewer use cases than $GOG and rubies.
Gold, for example, is mainly used to upgrade your Guardian’s level, gear and skills.
You can also use gold to purchase the odd item in merchant shops you encounter in Adventure and Endless mode dungeons.
How Do You Get Gold?
Gold is a fairly easy resource to farm. You can get it by:
- Completing daily quests
- Collecting daily rewards
- Using gold chests you receive from challenge levels
- Selling crafting materials
- Purchasing it with rubies
- Purchasing it in the shop with Arena coins
What Should You Do With It?
Even though it’s widely available, you’ll find yourself running out of gold constantly. That’s because upgrading gear is an expensive affair.
Upgrading a single piece of legendary T4 gear to 15 stars costs 7.2M gold…now times that by 20 to outfit your entire squad…
That’s why I don’t bother using gold for anything other than upgrades. I haven’t seen anything worth buying that can’t be farmed another way.
Guild Coins
As the name implies, Guild coins are awarded for taking part in Guild activities and challenges. You use Guild coins to buy power-ups in the Guild section of the in-app store.
How Do You Get Guild Coins?
The only way to get Guild coins at the moment is to make a donation to your guild.
You can earn up to 500 coins a day by donating 100 rubies. Donating also raises your guild’s XP. Increasing your guild’s level grants additional member slots and other perks.
There’s no indication from the team on whether they’ll add more ways to earn these coins, but I’ll be sure to update this section if they do.
What Should You Do With Them?
Since you can only earn 500 guild coins a day, you should only purchase the summoning stone packages.
The store carries crafting material and gear chests, however they’re not worth it at all.
The materials chests only provide a single level 3 crafting material, and the gear chests hold a random piece of Tier 2 gear.
These deals could be mildly interesting in the future if we’re able to earn more than 500 coins a day…but you can just as easily farm and craft these items.
Arena Coins
Arena coins are awarded for playing Arena mode, and you can use them to buy items from the Arena section of the in-game store.
What is Arena Mode?
In Arena mode, you challenge other Commanders to a winner-take-all fight against their squad. You can pick your challenger from a board of five players, and you can refresh that board up to 10 times a day.
You gain points every time you win a fight and lose points when you’re defeated. Your ranking on the leaderboard is based on your total score for the week.
How Do You Get Arena Coins?
Arena coins are straightforward to get as long as you play this mode daily.
You can earn them by:
- Scoring high enough to advance in tiers
- Clearing an entire board of five opponents
- Ranking daily and weekly on the Arena leaderboard
In other words, the more matches you win, the more Arena coins you stand to gain!
Winning matches in Arena isn’t all that difficult on lower tiers, and it’s worth trying because it only takes around 20 mins a day to complete your ten tries.
What Should You Do With Them?
Unlike the Guild section, everything in the Arena section of the shop is worth purchasing.
The priority buy has to be the 5 calling crystals for 500 coins each.
You can use these crystals to pull on premium banners, which will include Gen One Guardians in the future.
Those same crystals retail for a staggering 80 CAD (around 58 USD) a 10-pull, so take advantage of this free offer for huge savings every two weeks.
Unless you slay in Arena mode, spending 2,500 tokens to pick these crystals up will probably drain all or most of your coins each week.
If you do have some left over, then I would recommend using them to get gold and power stones to upgrade your gear.
The two summoning chests aren’t worth it considering you would have to forgo everything else to purchase them.
One of my Oh Canada Eh guildmates opened the epic one and received a random Core One epic Guardian. You can easily make up for that by farming Guardian shards or pulling on banners with summoning stones.
Rush Coins
Rush coins are awarded for playing the Boss Rush mode. Unlike Arena mode, however, you don’t have to perform well to collect them.
You can spend those coins in the Rush section of the in-game store.
What is Boss Rush?
Boss Rush is a new game mode that pits you against an unkillable version of a Guardian. Your score is based on how much damage you inflict before it kills you. You have three tries every day to score as high as you can.
You can choose to activate “Dread Powers” that make the boss harder to kill in exchange for a bonus to your score.
Your final ranking in Boss Rush is based on your high score for the week.
How Do You Get Rush Coins?
Here’s all you have to do to collect your share of Rush coins every day:
- Fight the boss once
- Fight the boss a second time
- Fight boss with 4 dread powers active
That’s it! You receive 450 coins a day for performing those three easy tasks.
What Should You Do With Them?
There’s some good stuff in the Rush section of the in-game store.
The three faction soul packages are by far the best use of your Rush coins.
One thousand souls a week can go a long way to helping you enlighten your Guardians, and you can easily buy them all if you complete the daily tasks.
You can save any unused coins to spend on Guardians.
Interestingly, legendary Guardians yield 500 faction souls when sacrificed, but only cost 3x as much as an epic. Epic Guardians only return 100 faction souls when destroyed, so you get better value saving for a legendary.
The Rush tickets and Wisdom Dust are a waste of coins.
Your score in boss rush is based on your highest attempt, so you don’t necessarily benefit from buying more tries. Wisdom dust is easy to farm from Adventure mode Challenge rooms.
Endless Coins
Endless coins are rewarded in Endless mode and are used to buy goods in the Endless section of the in-game shop.
What is Endless Mode?
In Endless mode, you take your squad through an “endless” wave of fights against mobs and Guardians. You receive points for each room you enter and each fight you win.
You have up to four tries per day, and your ranking on Endless leaderboards is based on your cumulative score for the week.
How Do You Get Endless Coins?
Endless Coins are easy to get just by completing your daily dungeon runs.
You get them from:
- Treasure room chests
- Every fight you win
- Weekly leaderboard prizes
- Season leaderboard rewards (every four weeks)
- The Endless reward board
What Should You Do With Them?
Each Guardian has a unique item that grants a bonus to one of the three primary stats and enhances one of their abilities.
You can equip them in any Guardian’s fifth item slot, however the ability buff only works for the intended Guardian.
The Endless section of the in-game shop is the main source for this special gear.
Items for legendary Guardians cost 6,000 Endless coins, while those for epics go for 3,000.
The Endless shop also sells the materials you need to upgrade unique gear, and it carries a daily supply of purple scrolls — a consumable you can never have too much of.
I always prioritize purchasing purple scrolls first. Leveling my Guardians is a never ending task, and 20 free purple scrolls is too much XP for anyone to pass up — no matter what stage of the game they’re at.
Once you purchase the scrolls, you can turn your attention to the gear.
You should keep in mind that you’ll probably have to buy any given item multiple times to get its best version. That’s because the primary stat boost and ability buff are both decided at random.
For example, if you’re purchasing Atticus’ Goggles, you’ll want to try until you roll an attack primary stat and the ability buff for Bombs Away that adds a 50% chance to apply burn damage on every hit.
Should you outfit your whole squad first and then buy the upgrade materials? That’s up to you.
Personally, I upgrade every item I purchase to level 20 before I move on so that I can use the item in battle right away.
There’s no right answer here. No matter what you do, you can rest assured your squad will be the better for it.
Dungeon Coins
Dungeon coins are unique to Adventure and Endless mode.
They let you purchase power ups, remove curses and escape from certain encounters during your dungeon runs.
How Do You Get Dungeon Coins?
You can collect Dungeon Coins in Adventure and Endless mode by:
- Winning fights
- Choosing the blessing option at the healing tree (Adventure mode only)
- Choosing to receive bonus dungeon coins in the first camp (Endless only)
Keep in mind that you can’t carry over Dungeon coins from one dungeon to the other. You lose them all once you complete your run, so there’s no use in saving them.
What Should You Do With Them?
So far, I haven’t used Dungeon coins very often.
The best use for them is in the merchant shop to purchase runes or to remove the nasty curses you accumulate every five rooms.
Unfortunately, the merchant shop only appears alongside the Blacksmith in Adventure mode, and the Mists of Fate in Endless.
The Blacksmith is important to refine gear, and the Mists can spawn the Battlefield Ruins which grant an extra boss fight.
That makes it harder to choose the merchant instead. There’s no guarantee the runes it has for sale will be the ones you’re looking for.
I also tend to choose the Barren curse early on if I have the chance.
Barren stops you from earning more Dungeon coins, making it a much better choice than other run-breaking curses like Inhibition or Exhaustion.
Saving your coins to flee from Shadowmire encounters — the last use case for them — is a waste of time. It costs 800 coins to flee, and I’ve personally never saved up that many in one run.
Conclusion
Understanding how to collect and use Guild of Guardian’s various currencies is important to power-up your account.
Making it part of your daily routine to farm and spend these currencies can help you advance through the game quickly and achieve higher ranks on the game’s leaderboards.
To summarize:
- Hold on to some of your $GOG to craft at the Altar of Sacrifice and to use in active staking
- Use your rubies to purchase more crafting and Adventure energy, additional endless runs, and summoning stones from the shop when you can
- Farm gold often to save for those costly gear upgrades in the future
- Use Guild coins to buy additional summoning stones
- Use Arena coins to build up your calling crystals and purchase upgrade materials
- Farm Rush coins to buy faction souls and save up for legendary Guardians
- Spend your Endless coins on daily scrolls and upgrade materials, then save up to pull for your favorite Guardian’s unique gear
- Keep your Dungeon coins for the merchant shops to buy runes and remove curses
I hope you found this post both entertaining and useful! Don’t forget to clap and follow me for more in-depth Guild of Guardians content. You can also follow my X account for daily tips and tricks.
