A closer look at the God Power changes

Introduction

The GU team released this month a much anticipated update to the God Powers. Thievery and Create in particular have been widely viewed as particularly problematic because of their ability to generate infinite value that many times carried matches on their own and created more value than other creature-centric GPs like Summon Acolyte and Animal Bond.

Chat between the players and the game designer Bryn Welch has been going on for quite a while in Discord. I even posted some ideas for alternative GPs back in September.

This update also has an impact on Sealed mode. With the new GP lineup, Summon Acolyte is now arguably the best GP to play in this game mode.

The new God Powers

• Create was replaced with a 2-mana "Selena’s Mark”: Deal 1 damage to a random enemy creature. This feels like a safe, default change, where for some reason a new GP effect couldn't be coded and tested in time for release.

• Thievery was replaced with a 2-mana “Guild Shiv”: Equip a 1/2 Makeshift Shiv with Godblitz and Flank. This basically allows the player to spam relics with Godblitz for the entire match. Playing relic removal against such an opponent becomes practically useless, unless it benefits some specific situation. It's well suited for aggro decks, as it can put consistent and cumulative pressure on the opponent's HP, as well as remove low-health creatures from the board. I suppose the card with the same name will become much less popular while this GP is available.

• Flip effect was reworked to make sure a bug where the second card could return to hand more frequently than expected from plain randomness. The card text now reads: Shuffle two cards into your deck. Then draw a different card for each card shuffled. This change should help any control deck that needs to find important cards quickly. It should also improve the consistency of combo decks like Mayday or milling decks with Cobra Scepter and Resurgent Sirens.

• Radiance was replaced with “Bestow”: Give the Chosen One +1/+1. This new GP is a direct competitor to the legendary card Forged in the Light. This card was never popular and I suspect it will be even less so while this new GP is available. Buffing +1/+1 instead of +2/+1 should also help keep the Chosen One alive against cards like Fighting Fair or Hunting Trap.

• Overcharge mana cost was reduced from 2 to 1. I played Overcharge a while ago and it felt almost good. This change could make spell-heavy decks more appealing. It will certainly help with removals during the early game, paying 2 mana for a spell boost to be able to remove a creature early on is not really doable.

 
For reference, here are the God Powers for the other Gods as well. These ones are still the same.

Comments about the future of the game

Bryn also made a few comments in the announcement post about what we can expect in terms of game design in the foreseeable future. The terms used in the post kind of need some decoding, so here's what they probably mean.

One of the comments about moving away from "hard tribal decks" means that future sets will print much fewer tribal cards than previous ones - Tides of Fate for example printed a lot of Atlanteans and Dragons. This also means that tribal synergies will probably have a lesser role to try and avoid creating too fast archetypes due to the card synergies. You can follow a conversation on this topic in Discord starting here.

Another comment was about moving away from "aggro-combo axis lines", which means the next expansions will be focused on interactions based on creatures and the board state. This is a reaction to the complaints many players voiced against combo decks played from hand, where the player doesn't have almost any counterplay and often any play they make doesn't do anything to fight the opponent's strategy. I still think combo decks would be better tolerated if the game provided more countermeasures to everyone else, but this doesn't seem to be an easy or practical thing to implement at this point.