1. Two rows
Cd projektred wants to please the community by giving rows more meaning. Thats great, but i dislike that they are removing one row "because the tooltips would get to long". Here is the obvious way of giving rows more meaning:
Unit name: archer
strength 6
Ranged row: Deal 3 damage
Other rows: deal 2 damage and 1 damage
Long tooltip huh?
It is quite obvious that you don't need to have 3 actions at all.. Just one action for the row the unit belongs to and one for the other rows.
I can't believe that the devs can not think about such an easy thing. They are not thinking clearly at all... Or even worse, they are lying about the real reason: making the game playable on smaller screens like phones and small tablets.
Why 3 rows are important:
-Weather effects and row bufs will become way more dominant if not unbalanced. I always wanted to auto-include merigold's hailstorm in my deck jippy!
-Right now playing around gerald igni is basically as worthwile for the game as scorch. Both cards add a lot of thinking to the game. But igni's effect has more meaning with 3 rows even if they nerf the card to shit.
-Destroying a ton of 3 row based cards, 80% of the cards is going to be changed... Why?
- Last minute rebalancing of 80% of the game doesn't seem to be a great idea.
-Lore: keeping the gwent the same like the witcher. If not, many people will dislike it. It is guaranteed.
Positive note: it is good that they want to please us by adding row based effects.
2. Good thing: gwent has by far the best art and lore i have ever seen in any cardgame and HC will make it even better i'm confident about that.
3 provisions
-Why overcomplicate the game? Allthough i haven't seen the exact way it will be implemented, i dislike overcomplicating things with adding resource systems to the game. Chess for instance is extremely easy, the rules only need like 2 minutes of explanation, yet it is extremely hard to master. Complex games don't need over complicated and unnecessary rules.
-It is totally different from the witcher, therefore homecoming has nothing to do with coming home
.
4. Good thing: trying to balance the win chance instead of relying on the coinflip. Right now it determines who gets 55%+ chance of winning.
Adding mulligans can be a way to do it, but you can also give the player who goes first a 5 point unit on the board or 5 extra base points or something like that. Most often you simply don't need 5 mulligans during the first round, but you can need 2 during the last round.
5. Decks are constructed with 30 cards and you can only have 2 of each bronze cards. It was 25 and up to 3 bronzes
This must be the worst decision ever:
-There will be much less consistency, thinning out your deck will be less worthwile, because you only pull out 1 extra card instead of up to 2 extra.
-Much more luck in drawing combo's. Right now you can find games inwhich a pro will draw/thin out almost his entire deck. Add 5 cards to the game and the luck factor becomes MUCH larger during the last round. Let's say you want to draw one card during your last round. You thinned out your deck to 4 cards only. You have 1/4 chance of getting it and 1/3 after mulligan: 1-(3/4)*(2/3)=0,5 =>(50%) chance of getting your combo.
But now we add 5 cards (it should be more, because you could pull 2 cards from your deck if you had one card, now you will be pulling out only 1 other card makes thinning mechanics much less useful):
1- (8/9)*(7/8)=0,22 =>(22%) chance of getting your combo. Result: more luck, less planning around combo's, and less value in thinning out your deck.
-Much less focus on deck archtypes and much more focus on auto-include cards that have more value on their own compared to focussing on combining cards.
-Scoia'tael currently has a shitload of cards with swapping mechanics, they will be getting less mulligans to compensate that, but i think that mulligans have the law of reduced returns. Swapping cards whenever you want has a big advantage over mulligans, especially with the change in decksize. For instance you draw a shitty card during a round and you can get rid of it your next turn by swapping it and it will not loose you the round. Mulligans have less value then swapping to a large extend.
6. Getting rid of card draw spy
Right now people consider draw spy OP. But consider this:
-You play one card on your oponents side and you draw one card, so you won't gain an advantage at all. It is basically the same as drypassing, even though you get to choose between two cards...
- You give 13 points and you draw a card, it is basically break even, except if you have a nice way of dealing with it. For instance reducing its value to 1 while revealed (nilfgaard) or some other ways to reduce the value for your opponent.
- It takes planning to get value out of it. The way you play it determines if you get value out of it or nothing at all.
My highest rank is around 4000-ish. But i know that some pro's are really hating some of the changes as well as the last minute rebalancing they will have to do.
last point, being a bit rough:
Changing silver into golds has only one clear reason: money grabbing by making important cards much more rare and expensive. You get full value of your silvers back, bunt you won't be able to craft the same silver that has become a gold. Yes you can use meteorite powder to craft a normal card into a premium card and get more scraps that way (1600 scraps for a premium gold), because they only give scraps back after homecomming. But it also lets you waste some other value of the meteorite powder, which they want to sell... And they are increasing the amount of golds by +150% (2,5 times as much), which means the meteorite powder into scrapvalue mechanic is still giving you less scrapvalue then necessary to compensate for that. Obviously they don't care about the original witcher's cardgame that much, because for the rest they are changing the game like hell (2 rows, provisions etc). To some extent it is ok, but don't lie about the real reason, it is better to say nothing about it at all. Money grab is the only possible explanation.
