Balance Changes - Hot Take on Tutors and Location Cards

[ShinAkira00]

This might be an unpopular opinion but All Gold Tutors and Location Cards should cost 14 provision. The name of the game currently...and this applies to all factions, is to tutor or filter all the useless cards i.e. bronze cards from your deck and then play all overwhelm your opponent with your golds. Everyone is either forced to do the same thing or lose to you and the culprit for all of this are the tutors and location cards that enable or support it.

It's a forgone conclusion now that tutors are what killed Gwent. It's not even debatable anymore. Broken cards are a symptom because you could always have broken cards before, but there was no guarantee you would draw them. You were forced to strategize for a round or two until you got that card. I think all these gold tutors and location cards need to be 14 provisions. You will see a drastic increase in the variety of decks when this style of play isn't mandatory to play the game.

 

[Trevorzan]

I did not know what a tutor is. so I searched in the web:

A tutor is a card that can pull of another card from the deck.

The name comes from another card game having a card that does that named "Demonic tutor"

For all the newbies like me.

For my personal opinion, I hate oneiromancer. I do not use it, do not even have it. On top of that, it is an echo that can be played on two rounds.

 

[WhiteWolf4207]

Tutors and thinning are good and shouldn't be nerfed to 14 provisions or higher. Having consistency is good. It might feel good when you win a match by RNG, but it feels horrible when you lose by RNG.

 

[quintivarium]

I would argue that extensive tutoring and thinning has increased the RNG of Gwent for at least two reasons:

1. It has allowed the developers to get away with allowing some cards to play for nearly 30 points while others play for 4. After all, a player should tutor for “consistency” — never mind that now missing one more 30 point card than your opponent misses almost always decides the match.
2. It (together with the fact that the cost per provision curve is concave up — so, e.g., the difference between 10 and 11 provision cards is greater than the difference between 4 and 5 provision cards) encourages extreme “polarization” in deck building. Players who choose mostly very high (10+ provision cards) offset by lots of 4-provision cards (to be mulliganed away) play far more points on the average than players who select mainly mid-provision (6 to 8) range. But it is far worse when RNG saddles you with a 4 provision card instead of a possible 13 provision card than when you unluckily draw a 6-provision card instead of an 8- provision alternative.

Unfortunately, in its current state, I don’t think Gwent functions without tutors — but I share the sentiments of the original poster. Moreover, increasing RNG is not the worst effect of extensive tutoring. By giving players significant control over when cards can be played, extensive tutoring reduces the need for ingenuity dealing with different draws and makes identical matchups almost always play out the same way — increasing the need for card changes to keep the game fresh.