Intro

The meta is stale with Anubians being the overwhelming dominant deck and shutting out everything else, so I got bored and tried out @copperpitch’s The Gods Unchained meme deck @copperpitch/the-gods-unchained-meme-deck. I promptly went 0-2 with it, then made a couple of changes to cut some control cards and added token cards to generate favor with the Student creatures. I went 0-2 again with my version and deleted the deck. It was like pulling teeth trying to get the favor while dealing with the opponent and waiting to draw The Gods Unchained.

Strategy

The game plan of the deck is to get 100 favor to play The Gods Unchained and win the game, easy said than done. 100 favor takes a long time to get while you opponent is trying to kill you and you can’t really kill them through damage unless you give up on playing The Gods Unchained but then why are you playing this meme deck, go run Slayer War.

The deck uses Student of Society, Student of Blades, and Ghostly Chariot to generate favor from your Viking tokens summoned from Viking Warmaiden, Bloodguard, and your god power. Blessing of War can gain a lot of favor from all of your viking tokens in your void late in the game.

Early game, you try to control the board and gain favor so you can get out Ghostly Chariot. With Chariot and 40 favor, you can use it to slow your opponent down while gaining favor. Hopefully, you live long enough to get to 100 favor and play The Gods Unchained.

The deck isn’t good and has a lot of things going against it. The Gods Unchained is a brick, it’s Legendary so you can only have 1 copy to hope and draw it, takes up most of your mana for turn making it hard to play with other cards, and gets blocked by ward. Most of the favor cards are from Trials of the Gods, which got power crept by two sets of expansions and there are no favor generators in MJ so a third of your deck are cards that haven’t seen play since they were released. You give up getting cards from the sanctum if you are trying to get to 100, so you’re giving up effectively 5 cards. Also, Blessed cards can completely wreck you by combining both player’s favors together and splitting them evenly. I guess the devs wanted an alternative win condition card, but they struck out on this one.

That said, the deck is a meme and hopefully never competitive. The Gods Unchained is a bad card, power-level-wise and in design. The devs had the flexibility of changing the sanctum cards and favor gain to adjust the game for going first/second or aggro/control win rates but now with The Gods Unchained around the devs have to skirt around the fact that 100 favor being I-win-the-game-now card.

Testing against the AI to show that The Gods Unchained gets blocked by ward.

Deck

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11 cards from Trial of the Gods to gain favor, a couple of Vikings that summon tokens and some filler cards to hold the deck together.

Most of your favor will come from Student of Society, Student of Blades, and Ghostly Chariot with your viking creatures. Ghostly Chariot summoning itself back after you have 40 favor helps you maintain board presence while being a favor generator, but 2/3 stats are lackluster.

Viking Warmaiden, Bloodguard, and Ulfgarr summon vikings. Battlebard and Grand Hall buff the creatures you hopefully have around gaining favor. Tavern Brawler, Viking Longship, Ravenous Chimera, and Rage-Filled Hammer have blitz to make trades and gain board control.

Conclusion

It’s a bad meme deck. The Gods Unchained has no good supporting cards and needs a complete rework. Rumors are that The Gods Unchained is getting buffed. Who knows what the devs plan to do? I don’t think the deck is any good even if The Gods Unchained was 0 mana. A lower favor requirement could be a future headache in card design space.