So can personal experience. I prefer data and the opinions of professional players, but to each his own I guess.
The basic idea from Nilfgard is to more or less take advantage from the deck of your opponent. This is mostly done via tactic cards and spies combined with assimiliate.
The downside of Nilfgard is that they have a lower average base strength and damage dealing ability. Additionally, the success of their cards heavily depends on the chosen deck and strategy of your opponent (e.g. Letho, Cahyr, Yennefer´s Invocation, etc.)
Taking a deeper look into Vincent van Morheen (11 provision, 5 strength), proves that it´s a high-risk high reward card which perfectly fits to Nilfgards benefiting from your opponent´s strategy:
- It has a fixed value of 5.
- Being a noble can be considered to have an additional value of 0,5 points (compare Van Morheen Hunter to Alba Blocker)
- So there´s 5,5 provision left for his removal potential. To my mind removing a statused unit might be valued a little bit higher. If your opponent uses powerful veil, shield, resilience he can be punished by Vincent. If he doesn´t you can use block, poison or spy to prepare the unit.
=> I would argue to change Vicent´s strength to 4 and give him one amour, which might make him more better fitting. Another idea would be the leave him as he is, but give rupture to the statuses unit. Then the opponent could react with purify also destroying the positive status. And units with shield and amour are a little bit protected. Then you probably would decrease his provisions.
However, one should not forget that Nilfgard is basically a high-risk, high-reward deck, as your success heavily depends on the chosen deck of your opponent. Additionally, the published win rates show that NG is by no means too strong.
The downside of Nilfgard is that they have a lower average base strength and damage dealing ability. Additionally, the success of their cards heavily depends on the chosen deck and strategy of your opponent (e.g. Letho, Cahyr, Yennefer´s Invocation, etc.)
Taking a deeper look into Vincent van Morheen (11 provision, 5 strength), proves that it´s a high-risk high reward card which perfectly fits to Nilfgards benefiting from your opponent´s strategy:
- It has a fixed value of 5.
- Being a noble can be considered to have an additional value of 0,5 points (compare Van Morheen Hunter to Alba Blocker)
- So there´s 5,5 provision left for his removal potential. To my mind removing a statused unit might be valued a little bit higher. If your opponent uses powerful veil, shield, resilience he can be punished by Vincent. If he doesn´t you can use block, poison or spy to prepare the unit.
=> I would argue to change Vicent´s strength to 4 and give him one amour, which might make him more better fitting. Another idea would be the leave him as he is, but give rupture to the statuses unit. Then the opponent could react with purify also destroying the positive status. And units with shield and amour are a little bit protected. Then you probably would decrease his provisions.
However, one should not forget that Nilfgard is basically a high-risk, high-reward deck, as your success heavily depends on the chosen deck of your opponent. Additionally, the published win rates show that NG is by no means too strong.
I don't know where these published win rates come from, would you share a link or something? By sheer Experience of almost every player, not NG mains of course, NG is overpowered, and happens to win most of it's games, as for NG Nature, that is off topic from this thread so I won't continue, and about Vincent, it's nowhere near High risk, it's no Risk High Reward, Tryggvi is a high risk high reward card, Vincent on the other hand always plays for it's value, far more than it's value in fact.
I like giving it Rapture, since Tryggvi is so OP as they say, well let's give this card Rapture too then.
The Win rates are here: https://forums.cdprojektred.com/ind...es-in-season-of-magic.11034074/#post-12093533
Last season best NG ability was imperial formation (Top 9, win rate 50,91 %) at Pro Rank. Imperial formation is not a ability which is best supported by Vincent.
To my mind, it´s more or less a psychological issue. When you loose against NG the lose is painful as they benefit from your good strategy (e.g. Cahyr when you use a self-boost strategy, Bribery hits your best value cards, Vincent or Yennefer destroy your center strategy card and so on). If you loose against other fractions is mostly that their strategy was just beating yours (e.g. powerful Skellige Greatswords and you could not kill them early enough, etc.) and then you do not feel the pain so much.
Last season best NG ability was imperial formation (Top 9, win rate 50,91 %) at Pro Rank. Imperial formation is not a ability which is best supported by Vincent.
To my mind, it´s more or less a psychological issue. When you loose against NG the lose is painful as they benefit from your good strategy (e.g. Cahyr when you use a self-boost strategy, Bribery hits your best value cards, Vincent or Yennefer destroy your center strategy card and so on). If you loose against other fractions is mostly that their strategy was just beating yours (e.g. powerful Skellige Greatswords and you could not kill them early enough, etc.) and then you do not feel the pain so much.
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First, no offense, but the supposed "downside" of Nilfgaard sounds like something you pulled from an advertising pamphlet instead of it actually being substantiated by any in-game data. "Lower average base strength and damage dealing ability?" Really? I mean, we could compare some of the bronzes to ST or something, but this thread being about VVM...
Second, playing a unit with status is not "strategy," and VVM's ability to just destroy it with no setup or limitation is not a "perfect example" of taking advantage of the opponent's strategy. Nor is Yen Invo, nor Letho copying Damien, nor Vanhemar destroying a locked unit, nor Vilge destroying ANY unit, nor Vattier seizing a locked unit, etc etc. Those are just examples of NG golds being "unique."
Personally, I think Vincent is too good, and it's not even a question of meat vs provision cost. The utility is just too broad, too instantaneous. Aside from "status" being reworked into "weakened" and "strengthen" or something to account for positive vs negative statuses, and until that happens, Vincent's ability should just be "destroy a unit with bleeding," and if his provision cost needs to be lowered to balance that, I'm fine with it going to 9 or something.
Well, each season I usually play with all 6 fractions 25 rounds. NG usually does not count as it is not TOP 4. From my feeling it is usually always when you play NG a high-risk high-reward game:
- Playing Slavery for me heavily depends of my Damien and my Stefan Skellen survive and how successful bribery is
- All those masked ball, spy related decks are not that bad, but win rate is for me usually lower than 50 per cent. Spy decks can be nice if your opponent plays a swarm deck. Otherwise, it´s value creation potential is average.
- Vincent I only include in my mascerade deck. Sometimes he´s helpful destroying resilience or defense units, but mostly I think that his immediate destruction does not destroy more than 5 points. Often I have to use an already poisoned or locked unit. Furthermore, mascerade ball is heavily weakened because usually I face a lot of veil units after I play the ball. To sum it up: Vincent became stronger because of MM veiled units but on the other hand his natural counterpart mascerade ball was weakened because of veil.
- Of course is playing a unit with status a strategy. You play defender´s to protect a powerful engine. You play resilience when you want to bring value to the next round. When you face NG you must live with the danger that Vincent destroy your strategy. Maybe one response is provoking Vincent being played earlier so you have room for your stronger status unit.
One can argue that NG has maybe the most "easy destroy" units, but all have them have drawbacks:
- Vincent: Most hope that valuable statused units appear or spend own power to status other units
- Yen Inno: Powerful in round 1 and 2 as you can benefit from your enemies destroyed card later. In round 3 you can only benefit if you still have abilities to draw cards from deck. One should not forget that not related cards probably do not fit in your strategy
-Vanhemar destroys locked units. They have usually lower strength as usually units are locked who do something each turn. Additionally, negative side synergies with units like master of dsiguise, slave driver, van morheen servant. Biggest drawback that if often happens that you have Vanhemar without locked units. Then it´s a 3 for 6
- Vilgefortz has a certain risk of activating strong units from the deck
- Vattier is expensive and can be killed easily if not protected.
=> All those card despite Yennefer´s Invocation and Vincent are high-risk, high-reward cards. And statistics show that NG is not dominating. But I am open for ideas with Vincent like changing from 5 strength to 4 strength with 1 armour or change from destroy to give rupture and additionally reduce his provision costs. Especially the second option I really consider to be nice as then we would have two rupture cards. Furthermore, the strategic options.
1) When I purify, I additionally lose the positive status.
2) When it´s shielded it only destroys the shield.
3) Thirsty Dames benefit from Rupture
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It's only 3 Percent beneath the top, it's some difference but not that much, not to mention that Harmony was absolutely broken, and countered Poisen NG because it was much more wide than tall, Also, Literally everyone was teching against Poisen NG one way or another, whole threads on what strategy works against them, yet they have A good win rate and play rate, when every player knows what to expect perfectly and has a deck optimised against Poisen.
If you still think Vincent imbalances NG and it's op af then check Team Elder Blood's meta report (of course NG is listed in Tier 2, waaay below SK and on par with NR) and have a look at the post-nerf playrates and winrates after more than 70000 (!) games played at pro (and this season almost no one techs Bomb Heaver). That's the last possible way that comes to my mind to show you that Vincent doesn't imbalance the game at all and if you can't or don't want to see that now we can't do anything else to help you. You could also try to play NG and include VVM in your deck for some time and keep track of your winrate. Would be very interesting to know.
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I will go up.
I honestly don't understand you people, who exactly are you trying to fool? what's the point of pretending that auto-include cards aren't good.
I'm already tired of explaining the same thing over and over and over again. Never have I ever said that he isn't good, hell he is one of NG's best cards at the moment IF he finds a good target. The point is that he's far away from imbalancing the game and everyone can look up the winrates or try VVM themselves to be sure. It may be frustrating to play against him, sure, but NG as a whole is far away from being overpowered. Just recently played against Ethereal and got my ass kicked despite the opponent having card disadvantage, Vincent made like 10 points or so in that game.
I agree that the best way to judge the power of a card is to see what impact it has when you try to play it, and not merely play against it. Unfortunately, this requires owning a card (and sometimes a supporting set of cards).
But I would also argue that just because a card doesn’t win matches against top decks doesn’t mean it isn’t overpowered. If it wipes out entire archetypes that would otherwise be viable — even if it bricks against against everything else — I would call it overpowered. And because it is way cheaper to craft a coherent deck than to craft response to all decks, certain cards that are easily countered in the larger picture are overpowered when beginners could be expected to have them if desired, but opponents cannot be expected to hold counters (a good example of this is Cahir).
That said, I have no complaints about Vincent. He is very costly, and reasonably countered by not overly relying on any single card. While I don’t play NG much, I recognize it’s need for relatively quick removal. Defenders, unless removed, make every NG strategy I try totally impotent. I have not found that true with any other faction.
But I would also argue that just because a card doesn’t win matches against top decks doesn’t mean it isn’t overpowered. If it wipes out entire archetypes that would otherwise be viable — even if it bricks against against everything else — I would call it overpowered. And because it is way cheaper to craft a coherent deck than to craft response to all decks, certain cards that are easily countered in the larger picture are overpowered when beginners could be expected to have them if desired, but opponents cannot be expected to hold counters (a good example of this is Cahir).
That said, I have no complaints about Vincent. He is very costly, and reasonably countered by not overly relying on any single card. While I don’t play NG much, I recognize it’s need for relatively quick removal. Defenders, unless removed, make every NG strategy I try totally impotent. I have not found that true with any other faction.
He ALWAYS finds good targets and he can't be anything BUT imbalanced. The condition is too broad, do you think CDPR future-proofs their cards? was he designed with veil in mind?
And yeah as expected it's just another "don't nerf my card".
I guess I'm out of this thread now, I said everything that had to be said and it keeps getting ignored, it's insane how good you are at this. Not going to waste any more time with this nonsense xD
Sorry, but that's... inaccurate on several levels. Not only does every deck that tries to interact with the other side of the board run into the same exact defender problems, but NG has plenty of other means to deal with defenders, such as poison or diviner.
At least in my experience, this is not true. I can’t speak for Syndicate as I've not played it, but SK, NR, and MO can play around defender through untargeted abilities and multiple engines that do not require interaction to trigger; NG does not have these abilities. NG does have exceptional removal ability, but most of its removal (including Vincent) requires two cards for each removal. Except for poison, the strong removal cards (Vincent, Vattier, Yennifer’s Invocation, Vilgefortz) are expensive.
Part of the strategic fun of Gwent is anticipating what your opponent might hold, and finding ways to work around it. If you predict Vincent in your opponent’s deck, you can’t directly counter it, but you can often trick it or force it to be used against a lesser target. And you can definitely avoid giving it extra targets. While Vincent can be annoying (so can Alzur’s Thunder when it destroys an important unit), I rarely find it dominating.
I don’t have experience to say that minor nerfs — such as raising provision to 12 or reducing power to 4 — would be inappropriate, but I don’t believe Vincent needs major change, and would be disappointed to see it.
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I fully agree with this; my argument is not that NG can’t handle cards like defenders, but that it seems far more dependent upon big destruction (such as Vincent) than the other factions I have played.
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So anyway what's up with people wanting to nerf signature cards in factions that aren't that strong to begin with? And Vincent isn't even included in some hybrid tactic decks that seem to be some of the strongest NG now.
So anyway what's up with people wanting to nerf signature cards in factions that aren't that strong to begin with? And Vincent isn't even included in some hybrid tactic decks that seem to be some of the strongest NG now.
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Absolutely. Especially vs. Harald. It CANNOT STAND that he would be killed with just one card when it only took 3 cards to kill him the first time! And veiled engines should be 100% unremovable vs. NG, not just 95%.
Well I played against NG right now and my Harald was killed by Vincent but I still won. To my mind, SK is heavily dominating the meta even after hot fix. And Vincent is a card being able to annoy Harald´s warrior.
Is Vincent a game breaker? Probably, he increases NG´s win chance by about 10 per cent when he kills the powerful third evolution card. Nevertheless, he has same provision cost as all evolving cards. Additionally, one should not forget that half the value of those cards is created by their powerful deploy activity (e.g. activate a warrior from your graveyard Harald). So when Vincent kills Harald this makes maybe an average value of 2 points depending on the power of the Harald based engine and the existing alternatives for elliminating Harald.
You know that Vincent exists, so just do your best by playing around him (or adjust your deck when you face a lot NG with Vincent), he can only be used once...an 11 provision gold card should be powerful. NG is the control faction and Vincent is a counter to your positive status like vitalaty, shield and veil.
And I think I need to say this til I'm 80 years, but your 'feelings' about this card are not a reason to change it. Nerfing cards because you don't like them is not useful.
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Every faction can play Geralt, it's the same as using Leo. And every faction can use Korathi which does the same job as Invo. And Vincent destroys units with status and not tall units, I think you did not get that.
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When all the cards were being announced i constantly asked if Vincent VM, a staple of NG poison decks would be able to target them... i didnt get my answer, only when the update launched and i found out he could indeed target veiled units...
He's so good now you dont even need to include poison or other status on your deck, the opponent will give you free targets for him.
But i think what really feels terrible is that Vincent VM is not the only powerful faction-specific tall/engine removal that NG has, they also have Yen's Invocation.
Im not saying either of them is OP, but its unbalanced when ST has not a single option - they had poison, but with the harmony nerf, ST also shied away from the poison dryads - NR has Bloody Baron, SK has Morkvarg HoT these reset but dont remove; SY has Moreelse but requires a lot of coins for tribute, sometimes not worth it; MO only has Imleriths Wrath, which only works as guaranteed removal if you have Imlerith on board...
Meanwhile NG has these 2 amazing options (Yens Invo and Vincent VM)
(EDIT) ok, so SK also has Vabjorn, but on a boost heavy meta he can brick; has Champion's Charge but requires bloodthirst 3 to be guaranteed removal; has Tyrgvi but his effect isnt instant, can be purified/shielded
1. NG is the control faction (so it's normal that they have better removal options). When you want that every faction has the same cards, then we don't need 6 factions but only one.
2. You are talking about engine and tall removal, but Vincent only destroys units with status and not engines or tall units. This has not really to do something with Vincent.
3. You can still play poison dryads, nobody stops you. ST was a good faction for about an year, now it's the weak faction (I like ST and hope they will be better next season) but that's normal in such a game. The reason because harmony is now weak, was the Gwent community who has nothing better to do than complaining about everything (Harmony annoys me because it is played for months, SK is ultra OP...NERF!!! (after one day LUL) and now NG and Vincent are too strong (They don't, but who cares...we just want to complain about someting). Most people in this forum do nothing else instead of talking about the real problem of this game.
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