Just a question: when exactly was NG the plague upon the game?
By being an awful bully that punished having any good units at all. Engines? Punished. Big bodies? Punished. Average bodies with an order effect? Still punished. Even regular 5-strenghts duds were fair game.
All while putting out decent units with bodies.
You
had to play either wide or unitless (still didn't guarantee the win!), the only other option was losing. I went with unitless and invented Dragon Dream Aglais thing, and had a lot of fun ultimately, but it was still a forced measure.
Know how playing against DB/SB felt? Much like it feels in SK Warriors matches right now. Pretty much the same thing, except with SK the damage is
technically capped.
I am yet to see a more deckbuilding-restrictive archetype. And that's how it was a plague that shouldn't happen again.
It was also popular at lower ranks because people didn't know how to play against it, and you could have 50+% winrate guaranteed because of autowins on red coin. But in reality it was never even top 3 deck iirc. There were way bigger plagues upon the game.
Okay, now that's just sly. At one point some meta reports put SB (not DB, admittedly) into tier 2 territory, and let me remind you - tier 2 means "very nearly the best", and the t1 decks followed a similarly annoying formula, except a bit more on pointslam side (but still with generous amounts of strong removal).
But just because there were stronger decks, doesn't mean it wasn't awful for the game health. After all, not everyone wants to just spam t1 all day.
Most importatly, said t1's didn't impose as many deckbuilding restrictions. You could just...add a Geralt of your choosing, maybe a couple of purifies and do whatever you wanted from there on. The Ball was a different story.
Greed did not have NG to balance it out anymore.
Actually, rockslide/korathi stuff in every deck is more fair than a "kill everything" deck that didn't balance so much as outright prohibited several archetypes. Oh, and just as importantly, "balancing greed" this way only promotes more greed, as in "spam engines until something sticks".
And the expansion reveals show how devs struggle designing this faction. NG cards are like 3 orders of magnitude weaker and more iffy then all the other factions (except SY maybe). Gwent will only become even more of what it is now: undiluted greed only balanced out by removal overload. AKA polarize your deck as much as humanly possible and then draw exactly the same amount of golds/removal as the opponent because if you draw one less then you (often) auto-lose.
Well, I mean, that's my whole point. Easy points are bad for the game, yet easy removal is even worse. They are careful with buffing NG as it could easily result in making a stale meta even worse than it already is. CDPR try to steer the game away from automatic engines and instant kill mechanics, apparently, but we aren't quite there yet... and while we aren't, buffing THE control faction is very, very dangerous.
Again, just look at the Warriors to see what I mean.
edit: if we had things my way, uncapped autopilot engines would be purged from the game and all the control cards would have to fulfill a decent condition to work (Corruption is an okay example), but it isn't happening soon, I'm afraid.