It's a long and skillfully written essay. May I paraphrase, less skillfully but shorter: "leave devs alone, Gwent meta is not their fault, it's all because of the players and how subjectively they perceive balance."
There is some truth to it. But most of the time, people play the strongest decks because they are in fact the strongest. Most meta now is Nekker because it's overtuned and unprecedentedly effective in its raw pointslam. Not because someone wrongfully decreed it is so, and the others followed. And not because of novelty. The support argumentaion in this essay is extremely selective and sometimes simply incorrect.
I agree that Reddit does Reddit things, and people have "opinions." But in general the message of this essay is not something I can agree with. It would be tiresome to try to refute it all so let me just focus on this one thing:
Jackpot is also an interesting case. Following its rework in 9.0, it was at 16 provision and dominated the faction. A 1 provision nerf in 9.1 impacted it but still left it dominant, and it pretty much disappeared after a 2 provision nerf in 9.2… Only to resurface in 9.4 following the nerf to Tunnel Drill and eventually took over the faction again. Since Price of Power had a pretty quiet impact on Syndicate at the time, it goes to show how much the perception around this leader ability evolved. It also raises the question, if it had been released at 13 or even 12 provisions right away, would it have been tried?
This argument completely misses the point. The shifts in Jackpot playrates were definitely not because of how the provision nerfs affected the playerbase psychologically. It was almost exclusively because of the changes to the alternative archetypes which happened at the same time - first crimes, then crimes again (Drill nerf) and then Pockets - and the changes in the meta of competing decks.
At the same time, we’ve had a lot of past examples of singular provision changes having massive impacts: Maxii Van Dekkar’s buff in 8.2 had the card go from being considered as something that would never work to an icon of competitive decks, Eist Tuirseach’s nerf in 9.0 led to a disappearance of Warrior decks, etc…
Putting forward Maxxi and Eist as a part of the same argument in a bit of a fallacy. Maxii is a stand alone card. A single provision change can often make of break those. Eist represents a whole archetype. Completely different scale and perspective. Also, same as the above Jackpot example, it's not the Eist provision change that killed Warriors. They were simply powercrept by other things.
The author seems to select those arguments at will and ignore the fact that it shows a certain lack of understanding of meta - how interconnected it is and what actually influences playrates.
very bad monatization system
Gwent is practically F2P. The only money you ever need to spend is for cosmetics. I hate to see how this so misunderstood. And so unappreciated in today's world of greed in the gaming industry. CDPR deserves huge respect in this.
Also, the argument that you need all the new cards to be competitive is just wrong. Majority of new cards never become meta. The real problem is in those that do and how overtuned and undertested they are.