Before Homecoming Gwent used to be one of the best CCGs where skill really mattered and was far more important than RNG. Even card draw didn't matter much, because there way many ways to thin through your deck and get the cards you need. It used to be one of the few CCGs where you could have a winrate of 70-80% simply because you were good at deckbuilding and playing, not because your opponent draw better or you didn't draw your key cards. In Homecoming they destroyed all of that and reworked many of the cards' abilities to be absolutely binary, i.e. "if you don't have a perfect answer, you lose to that card". Coupled with the lack of deck thinning and blacklisting during mulligan, this makes the game much more reliant on draws, i.e. RNG. Not only this, but there are much more cards with RNG effects, making the game less dependent on your skill. Along with that they also reworked the ladder (ranked gameplay) so it requires much more grinding to reach top ranks. For instance, before it was possible to reach the highest rank by winning 2-3 games a day during a month (so 60-90 games in total). Now even with 100% winrate you need over 120 games! This is ridiculous. Then, they destroyed a lot of the established archetypes by removing or reworking cards. Gwent is probably the only game that had more content (around 20% more cards!) in beta. I could go on and on, but to make long story short: CDPR took almost every single thing that made Gwent stand out among other card games, and destroyed or made it worse in Homecoming. Essentially, version 1.0 is another beta. And the most important thing: I am giving Homecoming 1/5 not because it's not the game we beta-tested and not because it's worse than beta Gwent. I am giving it 1/5 because it's a bad game by itself. There are too few cards, too few different game mechanics, leading to too few deck varieties. And binary card design (like artifacts) coupled with inconsistent draws makes winning a losing far too random.
