Reflection on the past Gwent Open

+
Reflection on the past Gwent Open

I watched the event for the first time, which was quite entertaining and exceeded my expectations. Previously I didn't watch such events because I thought they would be boring if I'm not playing myself. :) In any case, here's what we can take out of this event.

1. MO Deathwish decks were unstoppable. Literally, there was only one match, where deathwish deck lost to non-deathwish opponent. All participants played those decks very well.
2. By some reason nobody except the future champion brought greatswords deck to the tournament. It performed really well and got permanently banned right after the first round where it showed dominating performance.
3. Skellige veterans deck sucks. The guy who brought it played very well overall, but that deck caused him a lot of losses and cost him an overall loss (lost all 3 games in semis only with that deck).
4. All NG decks were Calveit alchemy, all but one MO were Dagon deathwish decks (only one player brought AQ consume), all SC were Brouver Hoog elf swarms, all NR decks were pretty much identical Henselt machines with rams and reinforced ballistae boosting BB, SK decks were all different and every player had his own ideas what works the best (this was the only faction to have a variety of decks).

 
Maerd;n10689711 said:
... All NG decks were Calveit alchemy, all but one MO were Dagon deathwish decks (only one player brought AQ consume), all SC were Brouver Hoog elf swarms, all NR decks were pretty much identical Henselt machines with rams and reinforced ballistae boosting BB...

This is what made me watch this GW for a couple of minutes every other game:

I can't stand playing Henselt, let alone watching someone else plays him (though I like Mithranor's version with Sabrina and Iris). Unfortunately it is perhaps the absolutely best deck out there right now, cause of it's Leader ability interaction with another Create card out there - Winch (you won't be missed when you go only to Arena, buddy). In general I find the NR Archetypes lacking and boring to play with and against. This faction had one of the most fun mechanics in CB and it has to rely on broken stuff to be viable. Sad.

Same absolutely goes with ST and Brouver, which totally relies on TWO absolutely broken mechanics to work. And one of those broken mechanics is a BRONZE card too (see you never, buddy, actually - hope I'll never see you again, too fast or not). Luckily - after it was figured out it is a lot less viable than after it's inception, but it still oppresses a lot of other fun, mostly Engine decks. I like playing Handbuff with ST and from my experience I can tell you it is a helluva strong deck that can WRECK absolutely everything if played right, but it is suffering from low tempo early rounds, which it is the thing I like about it - you have to give to take. Like, I've been going 2 cards down against Alchemy R1 to absolutely demolish it R3.

Deathwish was fun at one point, but when you face it over and over again on the Ladder you get quite bored of it too. I play a Eredin Frost build and I can tell you that I have over 60% WR against said Deathwish. But people are lemmings and even players going to tournaments are too scared to actually play something different from the pack, while you can actually surprise your opponents with a different and really strong deck, which can be built, albeit being a bit gimmicky. Not saying that tournaments players are bad players (like, I'm average at this game, they are classes above me, though I pride myself at building at few decks around certain combos and one of this decks is viable and my main-main climbing deck since before the Midwinter Fiasco), but they slide themselves in the same mold as everybody else and this should absolutely not be like that (kudos to Huyanachan, who is the only player out there that I see to bring at least one different deck from ALL OTHER PARTICIPANTS among all his decks over and over again).

Alchemy... I really loved to play Alchemy when it was not viable (even before Vipers were introduced), than came the realization that this is the only viable NG deck out there, cause Spies (which to me is on par there with Henselt boringness) were nerfed to the ground and Emhyr became one of the outcast Leaders out there, while Reveal can be a hidden lemon, but it is sooo predictable and actually counterable if you have the right cards in your deck. Alchemy also relies on a overpowered single Bronze card to remove point spam, which makes the deck kinda reverse point spam - if Vipers in general do 10 DMG, they should absolutely be at least at 2 STR (and in that case perhaps give them at least 3 Armor cause I don't want to see them die and be ressed instantly by my Frost).

With SK I have problems since I remember playing the game. Aside from Axemen v2.0 and Greatswords, nowadays all their other "archetypes" rely on brainless points and bodies spam. I really don't want to comment on SK, cause the faction is absolute BS overall (easily overpowered/overstated/broken mechanics that often need a nerf ASAP cause they start dominating the meta like crazy).

Anyway - I love the game, I love playing the game and I also love watching players playing the game. But because of the aforementioned reasons, this Gwent Open was the weakest and less interesting one to me yet.

Overall - I was bored with this Gwent Open as it introduced absolutely nothing new to the table. Like, I even skipped the final (prefered to finish with the weak Jessica Jones S02) and am yet to find who won it. Like, why is not there a topic about it or even a mention in the main topic for the event 1 minute after it was over? It's the OFFICIAL GWENT FORUM here, dammit.

Looking for better ones to come. :cheers:
 
partci;n10689871 said:
It's the OFFICIAL GWENT FORUM here, dammit.
I have a feeling that official forum is on reddit because most of the people go there and not here. And devs are also grazing there and ignore their own official forum.
 
I didn't have to funny watching the matches because of monotonous archetypes used, but I understand they were there to win and... Anyway, I learned about top tier decks.
On the other hand, I want to congratulate CDPR for the fantastic work you are doing with the The Witcher universe and how you are applying on Gwent. I love the way you take care the details: the emplacement, atrezzo, the fantastic music shown today. It's possible Gwent has to improve in some purely technical aspects like coin or create, but you guys have to be very proud of the road travelled so far.
You have the necessary wicks to create a beast and I feel that you are going to get it.

Congratulations to the winner and thanks for this fantastic gwent weekend. Keep it.


 
partci;n10689871 said:
(kudos to Huyanachan, who is the only player out there that I see to bring at least one different deck from ALL OTHER PARTICIPANTS among all his decks over and over again).

Just wanna point out that kolemoen did so too with consume. The other players quickly realized they weren't prepared for that and perma banned those decks. So the ones who brought different decks got punished for that. Which is ok and fair when playing at the top level but I wish for more viable archetypes for each faction, and the variation to increase soon. I hope what Burza said in the AMA holds water and is going to be implemented soon.

Remember pre-Midwinter? hell even the Dwarves season. Some didn't bring Consume, others didn't Bring Skellige back in the previous Open. Then there was Hanachan with alchemy. Pre-Midwinter most people except TailBot didn't run the greedy version of Consume, while Skellige's variation was off the charts, with Freddy bringing Cursed, someone else bringing Greatswords, others bringing King Bran.

But even so it was still not enough. There need to be a lot more truly viable archetypes for each faction. And to be truly viable, an archetype needs to be performing at the same level as that faction's top archetype. This will take a long while to happen
 
https://i.imgur.com/7aY05vc.jpg

If you observe the top deck win rates on gwentup:

- SK has 3 leaders in the top half
- other factions have 2 leaders in top half
- NR only has 1 leader in top half, henselt

This meta game and the '3 faction archetypes' are simply a mistake.

NR is especially weak in comparison to other factions, but that is not obvious because henselt is 'broken'. In fact, the only card necessary in a henselt deck is henselt.

ie: They have the worst rez in the game, no carryover, weak bronzes, low synergy, long setup, no tempo, etc... everything becomes a henselt deck, because of tempo.

SK/ST have the most reliable silvers in the game, some of the best golds, the best rez, excellent carryover, bronze potential, etc... this is especially evident with greatswords.

some archetypes are just not viable and are too easy to shut down because of all the removal spam, so everything gravitates to the strongest archetype. there are huge power discrepancies between these archetypes.

archetypes are a bad idea in general. factions/leaders should be thematic, but not strictly limited to a certain archetype and specific unit choices... 3 'viable' archetypes are simply 3 ways to fail at game design.
 
Last edited:
Everyone ran Dagon and no one ran weather clear... Was kinda a noob tournament to be honest watching people just eat 40+ points of fog damage every game and whoever got fucked the least by foglets won.

As someone who has played a large number of games with deathwish dagon I would have to say it really did overperform in this tournament compared to the bad matchups and the massive amount of RNG it usually inflicts on itself in larger sample sizes.

The only deck with weather clear is brouver elves so dagon looked good against a bunch of decks with no weather clear... Elves wrecks Dagon because it can dump out points way faster and has access to tons of weather clears from its create cards and weather mage.

Greatswords also completely owned Dagon and most people didnt run it for some reason and went with really bad SK decks instead...
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Greatswords are really good this patch. I expect another rise in their popularity after Hanachan's success. They are especially useful against Deathwish as they suck up archespore and fog damage like it is nothing
 
I loved the songs; the women they had have beautiful voices. They put so much work into these events; if they can just get GWENT to the level it deserves, they'll be putting out the best tournaments in CCG history from a production/entertainment/atmosphere standpoint.

I enjoyed the tournament, but would also like to see varied decks in different factions. I wonder if Henselt will drop off if it loses winch?
 
Top Bottom