F2P Mobile experience for new players Part 1: Day 4 check-in

So with mobile coming out, I've started a new account to test how a mobile-only experience could be for totally new players. Mainly to see the user experience, but I was also interested in how hard it is to progress nowadays. Disclaimer: having multiple accounts is against GU's ToS, and I'm only doing it for this experience. During these days I'm not playing any games with my main account, so I don't earn double P&E (and obviously earn much less with plain decks in low ranks 😅). The GU team noted that they don’t always enforce bans if there is no malicious behaviour.

I'll try to give timely updates (if that's something interesting for the community), but I also tried to make this some sort of guide for newer players planning to go the f2p route. So let's dive into it, and let me know how this could be improved.

1. First steps

Can you actually set everything up and play only using mobile? Unfortunately not at the moment. Signing up is possible, but you need a web browser on your desktop to connect your wallet to GU, and eventually claim your daily Play&Earn rewards. So I definitely recommend connecting your wallet first on GU's website, otherwise, you won't be able to claim/get your rewards. I'd also recommend doing the tutorial in the desktop app, as it explains the basics, and gets you some packs. These are the biggest pain points on mobile, onboarding is non-existent for now, but hopefully, this is their top priority now. Once you've done the wallet connecting/tutorials, you can jump right into ranked mode.

2. What to play first?

If you’re new to TCGs, there are many concepts you should learn about, but I might not be the best person to explain them, so here are some resources; A general tcg guide (in this case about MTG, I don’t have one specifically about GU), some streamers you can learn from: CopperPitch, SamBam, Aldous, Mepo, Hpain, Gu’s glossary page, and probably the most important site for the game: Gudecks, where you can see everything you need to know about the best decks and current meta overview.

Regarding the actual deck, I think war welcome cards are the best atm, so I recommend choosing Auros as your first God. This is the deck I’ve built from Welcome cards only, but at the beginning, as you get new cards from the packs, you have to quickly put the good cards in (I know it’s hard to know which are the good ones at the beginning, it’s mostly the beefy, high statted creatures), as Welcome cards are usually quite weak. The first few days you’ll have no other choice than to use the Welcome and Core card pool. In my experience, this can get you to Midnight Shadow / Auric gold, but there you’ll hit a wall and face decks that are hard to overcome with a not-even-completed Core collection.

3. How to progress?

GU, apart from earning in-game packs, you can get rewards for your daily performance, and use that on an open market to grow your collection. Well, on day 4 I’m at the point, where I can only earn from my 10 daily games, which will be available a week later than the played games, and grind to earn core packs. Over the weekend you can participate in the Weekend Ranked event. Here are the possible rewards for it.

Apart from this, the Star Store is where you can potentially buy meteorite cards (minimum quality you can sell), and then sell them at a marketplace. But along with claiming your Daily Rewards, Star Store is only available in the desktop client (or in case of the store, on gu’s official site too). Same goes for forging, but that's not really an option in your first 7 days as a F2P player.

The Gods/Eth and cards we earn from these activities will be used to develop our main deck. It's better to focus on 1 deck for 1 god at the beginning to progress, but for more fun it's totally fine to try different things out. But focusing on 1 deck is key to having a chance to aim for higher ranks. In the next post, when I get my weekend ranked rewards and some daily gods, I’ll try to go through some possible budget decks you can invest in to get to higher ranks. For now, it seems I’m earning a daily amount of 1-2 Gods, and I’m excited to see what this will buy me.

Overall mobile experience so far: I think deck-building is quite frustrating at the moment with the weird tapping on card interactions, and in gameplay there are some major bugs regarding additional summons, card draws, delves and connection issues, so expect some frustration and possible losses (or wins if your opponent is on mobile too) due to errors at this stage. At this point, you can create a deck and play ranked games only using mobile, but you’d need desktop access to claim your rewards and buy from the star store.

‘Newcomer’ F2P experience so far:

If you know the other decks and are experienced in TCGs, you can get to Midnight Shadow with relative ease, but even on the way up you’ll meet some decks that are a lot more optimised than yours. I’ve managed to rank up to Auric twice, and got deranked twice, so I feel that’s the limit for me and this early welcore deck so far. It can be a bit frustrating to meet some of the best cards (Demos, Blades, Hortuks, etc) at lower ranks, but looking at it from the other side, in 3-4 days it’s possible to reach a rank where someone is with those great cards. And it’s still quite rare, but there are plenty $10-20 decks that work great now, so I think it’s a bit of a struggle to quickly reach Diamond/Mythic ranks. Another positive part is enjoying opening core packs again, as you'll really depend on the good pulls to develop your decks early-on. But board-centric aggro war has its limits, so I’m excited to see where the budget improvements will take this experience in 4-5 days when the initial rewards will hit the account.

Let me know if you have specific questions, or have any general advice on how to include better resources/tips or just to make this a better read. Cheers!