Recent content by antlers

Thanks for thorough and scientific statistic gathering. One thing to remember: with a Legendary every 18 kegs, it is not uncommon to go 60-70 kegs with no legendary. It's happened to me more than once, and it is frustrating. Then you'll get two legendaries in a keg, or legendaries in adjacent...

The Orders/Charges/Zeal mechanics, along with being the *least* Gwent-like aspect of HC, represent a huge expansion of the design space. Ranges and row-locked powers with row limits represent a smaller expansion of the design space (not doing much that could not have been done with row-locked...

HC takes three giant steps away from Gwent as it was in the Witcher 3 henceforth referred to as Gwent), farther than all the other changes (weather, gold immunity, cards not tied to rows) that were made in beta. 1) In Gwent, playing the cards was the whole game. Cards sometimes triggered other...

Burza-- is there a Gwent AI farm that can play thousands of hands quickly to test out card tweaks?

One of the consequences of 2-row Gwent would be that there won't be enough room to play current hands (start with 10, draw 2 and then draw 1). Hands will have to be smaller, which means decks will have to be smaller (or give up consistency.)

It's clear that mobile has been the key to CDPR's plans for Gwent all along. The plan was to start off with something not too far from Witcher 3 Gwent, then smooth off the rough edges in Beta while they prepare a mobile-ready product. Midwinter patch was a giant step in that direction: new...

People really don't understand probability. If there is a gold in 4% of kegs, you will go through stretches of 60 in a row without gold almost 9% of the time. Thousands of Gwent players will have that experience.

There are indirect ways to fight nekker consume, even if warriors put lots of nekkers in the deck. If you take out harpy eggs, their setup is very low-tempo, so you can try to 2-0 them or go into a short round 3 with card advantage. Often they don't have enough consume to bring out all their...

I love the idea of different shop keepers-- just to add a little variety. I'm fine with the 4 then 1 of 3 card selection-- the minimal change I'd recommend was to get rid of the colored border before you turn over the cards. Finally, once you have a certain number of cards, you've got to...

From the GwentUp statistics, Meditations is an automatic include in the most popular and winningest deck in a clearly unbalanced meta. This is a good sign that it might be OP, even if it is unreliable in some circumstances. It is no wonder why, since it gives an opportunity for a ruinous...

Estimating from rank chart and posted tracker statistics, there are probably more than 200,000 people who play gwent regularly. Ofl these, 60% Euro, 25% Asia, 10% North America, remaining 5% everywhere else. Not sure why it is so relatively unpopular in North America.

Balance took a giant step backwards; UI is handy but you see less of the card art. My decks that I've adapted to the new cards get ridiculous tempo, and so do the decks I faced. You need to average 15+ swing per card to compete. This makes whole swathes of cards non-viable.

So she's always going to be 25 if she is in you dech at all? Isn't that just insane with Spotters?

Can someone explain how Ciri Nova actually works? I can't tell from the card text (no links to videos please). What does "starting deck" mean in this context? Deck post-initial Mulligan?

I agree that in the current season the variety seems good. My opponents seem to cover at least two archetypes in each faction, and except for Bran-resurrect, there seems to be a considerable variation within each archetype. If I play 6-8 games in a session, I'll usually face 5-6 different...