Does 3 rows matter at this point? I never liked the two rows idea. I was against it from the start. The moment the agility patch hit rows ceased to carry much importance. 3 rows with importance would have been ideal. 3 rows with importance is also objectively more complex to handle. So as bad as it may be 2 rows with more importance is a decent middle ground. Furthermore, 2 rows isn't anywhere close to the top problems with HC.
What do you mean with proper card synergies and combos? Both exist all over the place in HC. What doesn't is long, multi-card chains where you pull half your deck, pointslam a board and achieve the optimal auto-pilot play you're looking for. If anything HC improved the game here. Deck building is more open since it isn't about sticking to some pre-defined static archetype. Synergy and card combos are... smaller in size. You can still netdeck but since the deck concepts aren't spoonfed it's far more difficult to follow a simple guide to pilot them well.
Feel to disagree. I won't hold it against you.
I don't hold it against you either, but I disagree with almost everything.
I've gone numb in the fingers from repeating this over and over again. The rows DID matter even after agility, because you were paying attention where you put your cards - at least it was so in every game I played. I can link you countless tournament and non-tournament battles, where players were consciously arranging their units on the three different rows, for various reasons. There were countless cards and mechanics which worked better on three rows and were subsequently scrapped, changed into something else, or nerfed into uselessness (like weather). The game was better BALANCED on three rows. It was more fun to evade your adversary's attempts at removal (pure removal was considered reactionary and second-tier compared to building points), you had more space to play...Gwent is made to be played on three rows. It's better in every way.
Just because units weren't row locked anymore, or because they didn't do ability A or ability B or C depending on which row you played them (IMPORTANT REMINDER: which most cards STILL don't do today with two rows), that doesn't mean that rows didn't matter. It was just a popular PR catchphrase promoted by CDPR to justify their switching to two rows, which had ZERO to do with gameplay, and EVERYTHING to do with card art and marketing. I wish CDPR would deign to sacrifice 1/3 of their card size on the "battlefield", make some of the extra stuff smaller (such as the player's hands - especially the opponent's - the graveyard and deck), and squeeze in that 3d row again.
For me personally, and I am not alone in this, 3 rows is a must. And if we're talking about ideas, and what CDPR *should* be doing to give rows more meaning, instead of chopping rows, I direct you to my following thread:
https://forums.cdprojektred.com/ind...maximum-reach-3-for-non-siege-units.10991725/
It's very much feasible, the basic mechanics are already there (reach), many of the cards are already there (siege engines), they just need to be willing to put in the work.
As for the synergies, I'm sorry but the fun is just not the same when your deck is a mish-mash of mini-combos, and everything is only loosely related. There are big archetypes which still exist (NG reveal immediately comes to mind although it's oppressive for other reasons), but the new abilities coupled with the provision system make it very hard to build decks in which every cog supports the war machine. Also, while I don't like point-slamming any more than you do, you cannot tell me that pulling off a 6-card combo is not fun. It doesn't have to give crazy points. But just making it work is mad fun, as opposed to pulling out every card one by one. And the game DOES need at least some thinning. I'm not advocating for a return to Mill-era or Craitesword-era or Consume-era super predictable gameplay, but some degree of tutoring, thinning and card combos...cannot be the enemy here. Not sure what your stance is exactly, but surely we must agree that some more consistency and less draw-dependence is good here.