The only things keeping this "game" afloat are: 1. The Witcher universe 2. Appearance if uniqueness from the first glance 3. Nostalgia of beta players In short, you can be the smartest person on Earth, have a very smart deck, your opponent can be a bonobo, have the worst deck imaginable, and you can still "lose" because of no fault of your own. In detail, the game plays itself. All of the card design is extremely dull, but more importantly they don't give the "player" any meaningful choice to make. You can play a 1000 games with a single deck, and all of the 1000 games all of the "choices" you make when playing all of your cards will be exactly the same. It's a movie, not a videogame. Add to that the fact that a lot of cards' effect are extremely polarizing and too impactful. Keep in mind that this "game" has no "health" or any other value other than amount of cards in your hand and the strength of your units, which decide who "wins" and who "loses", so while in other card games (actual ones) the "boosting" of your units is not as prevalent and detrimental of a loss, in Gwent it's monumental. With that in mind you shall now learn that a single card can destroy a unit worth 10 times more points, remove all boosts from opponent's units or even destroy half of opponent's units. At the same time, these cards can simply do nothing when played if the opponent doesn't have sufficient points for the card's ability to trigger. This is developers' way of "balancing" the "game" in a nutshell: absolutely and literally 0 skilll involved, absolutely and literally 100 percent luck. It doesn't matter that the effect is extremely frustrating and unfair on both the receiving end, when the card works, and the giving end, when the card doesn't work, -- "it's okay" because "sometimes the card doesn't work -- so it's perfectly balanced". The amount of problems with this "game" is way too many to mention all of them or even worse go in-depth on all of them in this word-limited review.
