Provisions and Gwent deckbuilding

[Jeydra]

It seems to me that Gwent's deckbuilding is weird. The idea is to play more provisions than opponent, because more provisions usually means more points which usually means a victory. Since each game of Gwent lasts about 16 rounds, that means the ideal 25-card deck runs all its provisions in 16 cards, 0 in the rest, and hopes to simply never draw the 0-provision cards.

Of course that's not how it works in practice because of thinning and whatnot, but the idea seems to hold. For example take this Mystic Echo Harmony list. At the top there's a bunch of cards it always wants to draw, and at the bottom there're a bunch of filler cards that it never wants to draw. In fact if it weren't for the fact that there are no cards with 0-3 provisions, I suspect the deck would try to polarize its provisions even more: run more top-end, compensating with 0-3 provisions cards that it will always be mulliganing away.

Ultimately, then, Gwent's deckbuilding feels weird because one is putting cards one never wants to draw in the deck. Yes, in every card game some cards are going to be better than other cards, but Gwent's card quality is easily measured and some cards (e.g. The Great Oak) are literally 3x better than others (e.g. Dwarven Skirmisher). Back during beta gold cards were stronger than silvers which were stronger than bronzes, but not to this extent. Thinning to gold cards was a real thing, but it actually seems to me now that too much thinning will get you killed in post-Homecoming Gwent because it forces you to actually play those low provision cards.

I played Gwent seriously before Homecoming but have not played it much since, so I'm wondering if 1) this view of Gwent's deckbuilding is correct and 2) if so, whether that constitutes a design problem.

 

[Payus]

I don't think this applies to all factions and arquetipes. Some decks polarize prov cards, others go midrange and have sinergies that make you wanna play low prov cards that allow you to snowball.

 

[4RM3D]

1) this view of Gwent's deckbuilding is correct

Yes.

2) if so, whether that constitutes a design problem.

No.

/thread? Well, okay, let's analyze this.

In traditional CCG, like Magic the Gathering (MtG), you have a resource system (lands/mana) to offset the strength of the card. Gwent doesn't have this nor does it have traditional rounds. In Gwent, you can only play one card from hand every turn. This dictates the flow of the game, unlike other CCG that have a resource system for this.

In order to create cards of varying strength, Gwent used to have the bronze/silver/gold tier. However, only having 3 values, limited the design space too much because because every tier needed to have cards of equal strength. Also, it was more difficult to balance.

Because of this, the provision system was introduced. It does have the downside of creating more variance, but the upside of having more variety offsets that, in my opinion. Though, as I have also mentioned before, the system is still underused and has yet to reach its full potential.

The point is, the system does make sense. Except you shouldn't look at it from a traditional standpoint. Incidentally, traditional CCG suffer from similar problems, meaning there are cards you don't want to draw. To take MtG as an example, once again, you don't want too draw too many (or too few) lands and, further on in the round, drawing low resource cards also feels bad. The last point especially is comparable to drawing low provision cards in Gwent (in the final round).

 

[Raziel_888]

I think the provision system is one of the best things that happened to gwent. Players don't just put the same 6 golds in their decks, and it allows for some fine-tuning.
Moreover, it's a really good system to avoid problems like in magic (despite mana) or hearthstone (despite crystals) where one could fill their decks with rare cards, the deck ending just better than others and favoring the old/rich player. Here even as a new player you have a chance. Ok, you still don't have the same freedom as someone with the whole collection but you can still create nice decks.

Also like said before, you have different ways to use the system. Some will indeed fill their decks with only very low/very high provisions and try to keep the best ones, some will put mostly mid-range ones, or spread the provisions. Part of the game is then to try and win the early rounds while keeping your best cards/combos for later

 

[Allistre]

Having a bunch of filler cards in your deck really does dampen the gameplay for me. They have been improving the strength of 4-5 provision bronzes since homecoming release. Which is good, I think they realized they made a mistake by making that gap so big. It really made the game boring only looking for the same golds every single game. Playing those 4 provision cards before felt like you were wasting your turn, so you had to throw them back

So yeah I think it did create a pretty big design problem, but at least they are moving toward a better system like we had in beta.

 

[Iuliandrei]

I like the provision system and it looks to be good for the game, but i guess it could be a point of discussion whether we should have such a disparity of power between the low and high end.

 

[Raziel_888]

Having a bunch of filler cards in your deck really does dampen the gameplay for me. They have been improving the strength of 4-5 provision bronzes since homecoming release. Which is good, I think they realized they made a mistake by making that gap so big. It really made the game boring only looking for the same golds every single game. Playing those 4 provision cards before felt like you were wasting your turn, so you had to throw them back

So yeah I think it did create a pretty big design problem, but at least they are moving toward a better system like we had in beta.

It was indeed annoying but now we have more low provision cards. Hopefully we will have even more in the future. There should be way more options in low provisions, even smaller effects to some golds.

 

[Jeydra]

The point is, the system does make sense. Except you shouldn't look at it from a traditional standpoint. Incidentally, traditional CCG suffer from similar problems, meaning there are cards you don't want to draw. To take MtG as an example, once again, you don't want too draw too many (or too few) lands and, further on in the round, drawing low resource cards also feels bad. The last point especially is comparable to drawing low provision cards in Gwent (in the final round).

In MtG, in most decks, you never put a card into your deck that you don't want to draw. The only exceptions are certain combo decks which prefer the combo card to be in the library instead of hand. Yes, if the game goes long enough you might hope not to draw land, but you still included the land in your deck because you conceivably want to draw it at some point. If what I wrote in the OP is correct, then that's not true in Gwent - whoever plays the Mystic Echo Harmony deck is actively hoping not to draw Dwarven Skirmisher, ever.

I don't think there's anything intrinsically wrong with provisions - it just makes deckbuilding take on a different character - but the power disparity right now is huge. Who can truthfully say they'd rather draw Dwarven Skirmisher than The Great Oak, ever?

Also like said before, you have different ways to use the system. Some will indeed fill their decks with only very low/very high provisions and try to keep the best ones, some will put mostly mid-range ones, or spread the provisions. Part of the game is then to try and win the early rounds while keeping your best cards/combos for later

Are there any decks which prefers to draw low-provision cards instead of high-provision ones? If so, which?

--
Assuming this is a problem then the obvious solution is to homogenize provision costs somewhat. For example, make most cards cost around 10 provisions. Some cards could cost more, just like some cards could cost less, but they're all roughly the same power level. As mentioned in the OP, right now The Great Oak is 3x as powerful as Dwarven Skirmisher; if they were 13 and 10 provisions respectively then it'd only be 1.3x as powerful. One would still be able to tune, run The Great Oak + a 7-provision card instead of 2 Dwarven Skirmishers, but it wouldn't be a disaster to have to play the 7-provision card.

 

[4RM3D]

Assuming this is a problem then the obvious solution is to homogenize provision costs somewhat.

It's not obvious nor is it a good solution. Okay, yes, it would solve the problem, but the price would be too high. An easier and better solution, though not without its own downsides, is to make low provision cards stronger and high provision cards weaker. Simply put, a 4p card should play for 7, while a 15p card should play for 12 and thus a 9p card should play for 9. These values need to be tweaked and a new benchmark should be created. However, that's not really going to happen.

Who can truthfully say they'd rather draw Dwarven Skirmisher than The Great Oak, ever?

True, but the situation still arises when you (can) draw the proverbial Skirmisher in MtG, meaning it remains an issue in most CCG.

 

[Raziel_888]

In MtG, in most decks, you never put a card into your deck that you don't want to draw. The only exceptions are certain combo decks which prefer the combo card to be in the library instead of hand. Yes, if the game goes long enough you might hope not to draw land, but you still included the land in your deck because you conceivably want to draw it at some point. If what I wrote in the OP is correct, then that's not true in Gwent - whoever plays the Mystic Echo Harmony deck is actively hoping not to draw Dwarven Skirmisher, ever.

I don't think there's anything intrinsically wrong with provisions - it just makes deckbuilding take on a different character - but the power disparity right now is huge. Who can truthfully say they'd rather draw Dwarven Skirmisher than The Great Oak, ever?



Are there any decks which prefers to draw low-provision cards instead of high-provision ones? If so, which?

--
Assuming this is a problem then the obvious solution is to homogenize provision costs somewhat. For example, make most cards cost around 10 provisions. Some cards could cost more, just like some cards could cost less, but they're all roughly the same power level. As mentioned in the OP, right now The Great Oak is 3x as powerful as Dwarven Skirmisher; if they were 13 and 10 provisions respectively then it'd only be 1.3x as powerful. One would still be able to tune, run The Great Oak + a 7-provision card instead of 2 Dwarven Skirmishers, but it wouldn't be a disaster to have to play the 7-provision card.

Quite many NR decks use low provision cards, either for pings with charges or the synergy with boosts. SK has some that are the only reliable engine for self damage. The harmony driads, the driads that move/boost, thrive monsters, fire scorpions, tactics, seductress, thinning cards...

 

[Jeydra]

It's not obvious nor is it a good solution. Okay, yes, it would solve the problem, but the price would be too high. An easier and better solution, though not without its own downsides, is to make low provision cards stronger and high provision cards weaker. Simply put, a 4p card should play for 7, while a 15p card should play for 12 and thus a 9p card should play for 9. These values need to be tweaked and a new benchmark should be created. However, that's not really going to happen.

That's likely a better solution.

I'm not particularly keen to experiment with Gwent right now in part because of the issues described in the OP (and in part because I have tons of things to do), might look at the game again if this is addressed.

 

[IndianaJohns]

I'm not sure why people would create such huge disparity decks. For me, the enjoyment in deckbuilding comes from trying to spend all my Provisions as efficiently as possible. I can safely say that after a lot of tinkering, I made myself a deck where I'm happy to draw any of my cards (and even if the situation doesn't require those specific cards, I can mulligan them or manipulate my draws and deck with certain other cards). The last change I made was ditching my Dahzbog Runestone because I found myself either mulliganing it every round, or sighing when I had to play it.

There's no reason to include cards you don't ever want to play. Life's too short for that.

 

[Guest 4368268]

I was in favour of the provision system when I heard they were introducing it. I now feel like I was wrong to be. Though that feeling is in part because of the way they've implemented and handled the provision system.

For example, a big problem with the provision system is that to this day it makes no distinction between boost and damage. Boost should be cheap as it's vulnerable to all kinds of disruption and damage should be expensive because it's safe to play (especially now that unitless decks don't really exist anymore)
Sarah and Johnny are both 6 provisions. As such they form a solid example of that.

Another grievance I have is it chains cards down too much.
Like you said, a provision is meant to represent a given amount of points and the developers have clearly tried to make sure in most cases it'll not exceed those points. The easiest way to accomplish that? Make effects simple. Just look how many - '3/4 deal 4 damage' cards there are. So instead of having a system where through clever deckbuilding you try to get more value out of a card than is initially expected and incentivizing creativity, the game attempts to do that job for you.

In open beta some decks played bronzes for 8 points and some played them for 18 points. The ultimate value often depended on how much the deck is build around said cards.
For example, Viper Witchers in Alchemy Nilfgaard and Nilfgaardian Knights in handbluff.

Wildhunt Drakkar could be a measly 7/8 points or 16. Your bronze core won or lost you the game depending on how well you built your deck and how you played and also how well your opponent dealt with it. Now when cards exceed certain values there's immediately calls for nerfs or even if there's not CDPR will simply delete an archetype (Skellige beasts for instance)

The game wants your golds to win you games. This creates the obvious problem that golds are often just raw value cards that barely require specific deck building and also the fact that draws become more important making luck a bigger factor (always a terrible thing)

In open beta you could lose to Reaver Hunters, Greatswords, Ghouls, Viper Witchers, Spotters, Bearmasters and importantly you could therefor also win by playing around them which was possible because you could identify them in time. Round 1 and 3 were closely intertwined in the sense that you were playing towards your win condition right from the very beginning.

Now it's often a matter of hoping you can just save your pointslam golds for R3.
I reckon provisions were introduced because the developers 1. Hoped it would encourage creativity and make decks less similar and 2. Help them balance the game. I think they've objectively failed in the first one and I personally think they've failed in the second in varying degrees throughout Homecoming.

Ultimately, Golds/Silvers/Bronzes form a far superior foundation for me. It makes it easier to balance certain abilities, it makes it easier to balance tutors, it makes it so that your deck relies on synergies and not on a combo piece or two to win the game. I think Homecoming destroyed a big chunk of the creative aspect of Gwent and provisions played a big negative part in that.

 

[Ulubey0]

Ultimately, Golds/Silvers/Bronzes form a far superior foundation for me. It makes it easier to balance certain abilities, it makes it easier to balance tutors, it makes it so that your deck relies on synergies and not on a combo piece or two to win the game. I think Homecoming destroyed a big chunk of the creative aspect of Gwent and provisions played a big negative part in that.

Definitely! I think the best thing about the old bronze/silver/gold system was that the rarity of the cards affected actual gameplay. There were around 50+ cards in beta that used card rarity in their abilities like:

• Hailstorm and Artefact Compression that could target bronze/silver.
• Barclay and Stennis that could only pull bronze/silver.
• Slave hunter that could target bronze only.
• Royal Decree and Renew could only target gold.

It was a great way of balancing abilities so they weren't too strong. It added skill with deckbuilding too since many of these rarity based abilities were tutor cards, so you had to keep conscious of the rarities to optimize the deck.

Then there was a whole other level of complexity when you added in the Promote and Demote mechanics. Demoting an enemy gold card so you could target it with a silver/bronze only spell... or demoteing your own gold so you could use decoy on it, or resurrect it easier with sigrdrifa. These strategies are completely gone in Homecoming. All the cards feel so neutered, like nothing outside the box is allowed...

 

[4RM3D]

I think the best thing about the old bronze/silver/gold system was that the rarity of the cards affected actual gameplay.

Correction, the quality of the cards, not the rarity.

Quality was: bronze, silver, gold
Rarity was: white, blue, purple, gold (i.e. the crafting costs)

 

[hachri80]

Quite many NR decks use low provision cards, either for pings with charges or the synergy with boosts. SK has some that are the only reliable engine for self damage. The harmony driads, the driads that move/boost, thrive monsters, fire scorpions, tactics, seductress, thinning cards...

I absolutely agree. When playing SK you almost always want to draw your priests as they are one of the strongest cards of this faction.

I woul'd say that I never put cards in a deck that I never want to draw. Some I always want to draw others are good in certain situations.