Honestly, I think I agree with Team Elder Blood’s assessment.
NG Cultist decks are the type of binary degeneracy that is absolutely destroying Gwent, but they are not consistently overpowering. If you have sufficient expendable tempo to win round one (while the cultist player is still setting up carryover) and if you have enough removal to eliminate the first few infused units as they are played (so you can bleed deep into round two), cultists are very weak in a short round three.
I was actually surprised to win my last two matches against this meta deck while playing garbage decks designed solely to quickly advance autumn cycle decks. Admittedly, at least one of my opponents played very poorly (I am intentionally not advancing off rank 25 to minimize the amount of games where I encounter the binary garbage prevalent at higher levels), but I am not exactly trying hard either.
The problem with cultists is that not all competently constructed decks have the necessary tools to compete. But I think a sufficient proportion of current meta decks do to limit cultists’ tier evaluation.