GWENT: The Witcher Card Game

meeting a girlfriend who was once a bubbling personality and a professional athlete, but is now a recovered alcoholic with several plastic surgeries to ward off the wrinkles.. i can see she's been trying hard to return to form, being more social, throwing lavish parties for the bourgeoisie and commoners alike.. but she's not the love i left behind. I can barely recognize any of the traits I fell in love with. Can we ever be together? I don't know, and I dont see it happening.. There's only so many times a man can have his heart broken. I guess I should just head back home and buckle up for a long haul of sadness..

It's weird to see your favorite card game get stripped of it's original mechanics and in a sense, it's identity. I understand that CDPR wants to make the game availible on mobile. That is probably the reason that the game somehow now has two fighting rows instead of three. But by chaning this core mechanic, they now have to change everything includding bluffing and combo's. This has made the game a lot less interesting than it's other early beta versions which were more stable and varried. This by the way is my first and probably only game review on GOG, i only did it because i hope that CDPR looks at what is wrong with the game and maybe make the older versions availible to play just so i don't have to start up witcher 3 all the time so i can play the good version of this game(still unbalanced somethimes tho).

I like witcher series so i decided to give a shot to Gwent standalone game. I wouldn't recomend it to anyone because it's very unfriendly to newcomers. You progress rather fast till around rank 10 or something but then it gets really tedious and you can't really compete against all those meta-decks with those resources you got as a newcomer. You can't go back to sandbox either because you locked to the rank you already achieved and you aslo cant play casual where matchmaking is literally non existant and even worse than in ranking because people being matched not based on anything so you can be matched against some tryhard with full collection or vs a guy with basic deck which is rdcls. Also the game has many dead cards with no use whatsoever like "Wyvern scale shield" or "Hattori" which are not being reworked. All that leads to severe binary play and boredom seeing all the same meta decks again and again in games. All in all it's just typical f2p game scenario where overall the game lacks stable foundation but devs just keep throwing new stuff into it. The music and artworks in the game are nice tho.

I've only discovered this game recently so I can't compare it to "the old Gwent" or W3 Gwent (I haven't played Witcher 3 yet). Also, I have little to none experience with other deck building games. That being said, I'm really enjoying Gwent! Yes, it can be hard. Yes, some players you encounter have decks that are almost impossible to play against. Still, after just few weeks, playing mainly F2P, I already have a deck that has around 60 % win rate. Here are some tips if you're just starting out: - choose one faction and spend your Ore buying only this faction's card kegs (+neutrals) until you manage to build a deck that can counter most opponents - same with Reward Book - complete few of your main faction's trees before moving on to the others - use your Scraps wisely - crafting a few legendaries (800 cost) will boost your deck's power much faster than wasting the scraps on cheaper cards - you need to craft certain cards (like Korathi Heatwave and Oneiromancy) ASAP - you'll notice the others as you play - crafting the cheaper cards makes sense once you already have some legendaries and you already know what you're doing so you're crafting the cards that fit your deck Anyway, no deck can win the game for you. You still need to learn what card is best to play depending on situation, when to pass and when to push. And this is what gives this game the depth it has! Yes, you will feel like some opponents/strategies are overpowered. Sometimes you may be even right. Most of the time though, it's only about finding (and executing) the right strategy to counter them. And when you manage to outsmart an opponent playing something that has crushed you before, it's really satisfying... :)

I like playing gwent in the morning with a fresh brew or in an evening with a full bottle of wine in my face