Relative Value of Cards in Gods Unchained
An analysis of the new blockchain game Gods Unchained
Introduction
Gods Unchained (GU) is a digital trading card game (TCG) that is played in a desktop app, but the cards exist on the Ethereum blockchain. The game has recently gained attention when the Mythic Titan card known as Hyperion sold for 146.28 ETH, which at the time was about $62,000! There are still two Mythic Titans hiding in the packs, although the chances to find one are one in a million. Because the cards exist on the Ethereum blockchain, the users permanently own their digital cards. They can trade or sell their cards on sites like OpenSea or TokenTrove. As a Hearthstone player who has spent lots on money on packs of cards, I am really excited for this functionality. I can optimize my collection without destroy my account-locked cards to build competitive deck. The Beta is expected to be released in early October ‘18 and go live early January ‘19. There is also a tournament happening with a $1.6 million prize pool!
Special Packs
Unlike any other digital card game, Gods Unchained allows you to buy special packs that guarantee a card of the purchased rarity. If you buy a legendary pack, you will get at least one legendary card. In this article, I’d like to investigate how the Gods Unchained pack selection system may affect the value of the cards. As mentioned previously, I believe that the ability to trade/sell is the key to making a successful trading card game. At first glance, it’s great since you don’t have keep rolling the dice to get a single one legendary. You pay more, but vastly reduce the space of possible cards. In Hearthstone, I’ve been disappointed with the 50 pack deals that are released whenever a new expansion is released. I paid 50 bucks only to get 2 of over 20 legendaries in the set (and one is guaranteed)!
The problem is that giving players the ability to select their card rarity causes a biasing effect on the available card distribution, which in turn may cause an undesired effect on the value of the cards.
Simulated Data
Before I get into the analysis of the existing cards (all of the cards that have been pulled by people up to August 29, 2018 at 3pm PST), I’d like to show what an unbiased card opening distribution would look like. In the buy-cards section of the Gods Unchained website, we can see what the base rarities of the cards are.
When one buys Yugioh cards, Pokemon cards or Hearthstone cards, the packs come from an unbiased population, where the distribution resembles the base probabilities. I wrote Python code to simulate randomly opening 750,000 cards (close the the amount of pulled GU cards) with the probabilities given in Table 1. The plot in Figure 1 shows one run of the simulation.
If we divide each group of rarities by the total amount cards, we get the following data in Table 2.
As expected, we see that the simulated rarity (amount of cards of that rarity over total amount) are similar to the base rarity.
GU Scraped Data
In order to determine whether legendary packs could cause value issues, I needed up-to-date data on the cards in GU. I used the command line and Python to web-scrape the GU site that shows every card that has been pulled from packs. This web scraping was done on August 29th, 2018 at 3pm PST. The data was in a very very ugly html format, so I had to clean it up. I selected the important information and stored it into a Pandas (Python library) dataframe. Here is a small sample of the the cleaned data.
After getting all the data into a nice format, I ran an analysis on it and created pretty looking graphs. The following plot shows the true distribution of the cards that have been pulled as of 8/29/18 ~3pm PST.
The major thing that pops out is that epic and legendary cards are similarly represented. If we compare the percentage of legendaries to available cards with the base rarity in Table 3, we see that the probabilities for legendaries are largely different than the base probabilities. The difference is large enough to be statistically significant.
There are ~27k more legendaries existing in the game than in the unbiased simulation.
Analysis
It is extremely challenging to determine the value of a digital asset without a market. As a card player who wants to try to collect/buy the best value cards, I’d like to at least give it a SWAG (scientific wild-as* guess). This will allow me to optimize my collection pre-open market. Due to the complexity of speculating a future market, I need to make a couple assumptions. I assume that the value of a card is proportional to the availability of that card and that power-levels are equal. When the market is first open this is likely to be true since the meta (cards ranked into competitive tiers) will still be in flux. If we look at existing competitive card games like Yugioh or Magic, cards that are heavily used in competitions are priced higher than weaker cards. Because we don’t have a meta, we will have to assume that the cards are all equal. All legendaries have equal demand, all epics do as well, etc. Given these assumptions, we should be nervous about our coveted legendaries. The data shows that our legendaries are equally available as an epic card. In addition, we need to remember that legendaries are each limited to one per deck and each epic is limited to two per deck. From an economics perspective, this is equivalent to sliding the demand line up for the epics since we need two copies, which would cause a higher equilibrium price. Because of this, an epic may be worth equal to or more than a legendary!
Conclusion
Gods Unchained’s scheme of buying legendary packs may drive the effective rarity and value of legendaries down. These cards are generally the most important in a game, since they usually have meta influencing effects. It’s an incredible experience to get a legendary anything; whether it be a special sword in an RPG or a legendary card in a TCG. This experience should be the same in Gods Unchained. Trading and selling digital cards will be the most important differentiating factor from all other digital TCGs, and it is important that the team gets it right. There will be more sets released in the future including the core set, so the team will have time to tune their pricing and rarity statistics. Overall, I hope for the game’s success and am very excited to test the beta in the near future.
Notes
If there is interest in the data or code, I can write an article/how-to explaining my process. Drop a response below and let me know!
Buying cards with Ethereum can be intimidating. Here is an awesome guide for newbies: Make Purchases | Gods Unchained by Fuel Games
