People complain a lot about "the coin flip" but I think a lot of people fail to recognize the real problem. It's not actually one simple issue of who plays first (and naturally last). It's a bag of little advantage/disadvantages that compound together to give the blue coin a bad rep. It's therefor not one major solution, but a host of small adjustments to reduce the impact of the disadvantages, and without making fundamental changes to the rules.
Additionally, I believe that leader initiative to decide the coin toss is completely avoiding the problem. This post does a really good job of highlighting the issues with initiative. Also, It seems like the extra mulligan(s) for blue coin is an attempt to offset turn one tempo to give blue a naturally better hand. But I think it has no real bearing on the problem and will have an extremely minimal impact. Extra mulligans would be much more impactful on turn 3 when the deck has less than 20 cards in it, but you can't just assign it to blue or red. I'd like to try and highlight the more recent ways HC suggest to deal with the issues of the coin toss, how effective it stands to be with the information we have, and provide some suggestions that would have a better impact on the issue.
Criteria
1. Reduce the potency of card advantage, but not eliminate it.
2. Players need to be impartial to the coin; reactivity and card advantage need a certain degree of separation. This is the problem I believe proposed solutions like Bidding, initiative, and phantom points cannot deal with.
3. Alleviate blue coin tempo requirement in some way.
4. Scalable with player skill, Not reverse the advantage at any MMR.
5. Not change any fundamental rules of the game or destroy healthy archetypes.
Problems
First round
-First issue, dry passing (hard committing to a reverse bleed for card advantage). Adding card limit to the hand is probably the best way to decentivize dry passing round 1, this is a great solution that very importantly doesn't interfere with your ability to dry pass round two, either to lessen a disadvantage, reclaim equal cards, or take an advantage for r3. Big thumbs up, but I'd like to add a school of thought. If you don't want somebody to dry pass r2, you should need to choose to establish carryover (more than them) to decentivise it.
-Second, low tempo/carryover (first round dynamics). Playing low tempo on blue lets your opponent get ahead of you and pass for 2 card advantage. Establishing carryover to block the dry pass is the only clean way out of a loosing round 1, and makes it okay that your cards are worth less because you can soft commit to a reverse bleed without sacrificing a crown or CA. More importantly, there needs to be SOME way to make it okay that your core is worth less than your opponents. These are important dynamics that TW3 gwent did not offer, and it looks like homecomings answer is to purge both macro and carryover. What's the point in playing a game without macro, It's like playing Starcraft without a keyboard. This may help with the bag of coin flip issues, but it leads to a really static game of who has more points, and no strategic advantage to play for. I think a better answer is to lean into the "carryover to counter tempo" strategy; have more cards like morkvarg that add some small measure of defence to later round/s. I've always loved that gwent feels like a very three dimensional game in that (for your proactive plays) you can play tall (tempo) wide (swarm) or forward/backwards (carryover/CA spies), but homecomings aim seems to be to remove wide and f/b, and shoot tall in the foot.
Second round
-third issue, over bleeding/ CA (card advantage) spies
Bleeding should always be a viable strategy. However there are permutations of any match where bleeding is too effective and lead to a guaranteed win. Part of the problem is the natural length of round three. Being able to control the length of round 3 is a very big advantage to be able to play for, and 3 card draws on R3 reduces the potency of bleeding which is a good thing. However, I think drawing 3 on R3 is actually dampening the specific problem too much, perhaps 2 draws would be perfect. But the other answer HC provides is removing CA spies, and if the cost is cutting a core strategy of gwent I think it's too high.
The real problem with spies-
CA spies will always be too good as is. Making a delay play with no future drawback is just inherently very strong in this 3 round format. As we learn from ciri in the tutorial "it's okay to loose a battle to win the war", and If you have the reach to overcome your negative point play, you can thoughtlessly force your opponent into a loose loose scenario. You can inflate or deflate the power meta to any level and we'll never find a good power for CA spies, but that doesn't mean it's time to throw in the towel on the entire strategy. Playing spy r1 needs to have a low tempo set up to make it more expensive to overcome, or a deeper cost than points in one round. It needs a fairly potent drawback if not compensated for, but no so potent that you can't compensate for it.
The way to bring balance to spies is to give them dynamic power, and to make them provide overcome-able carryover. In today's power meta, they should be 1 pt cards that strengthen based on the round (10,13,16), and have a turn end ability to spawn a 5pt token to turn 2 or 3. Also enough of this tutoring spy hyper thinning garbage. If you want to trade up on a spy you should have to play something low and proactive. If you want to tutor a spy it comes from marching orders, and with the downside that you trade down for the efficiency of marching orders.
Or alternatively; In homecoming there could be a new class of cards where any deck can only have 1 from the entire pool and the card is guaranteed in a specific round (similar to old bloody Barron, or how quest cards have been described to me from hearthstone). CA spies would fall into this pool, and other non CA cards would help carve out new breeds of decks. This system would also promote deck diversity because not every deck will want a spy more than something else they can guarantee, and not every deck will want a "quest" card at all if there's a greater provisional cost for including it.
Third round
-fourth issue, reactivity/Card advantage
Today reactive cards suffer in a short round and top deck situation if you don't have the reactive play. These cards would benefit massively from a way to delay their action; which reduces the potency of card advantage. My solution to the reactivity problem is this; Any card with both a discrete effect (for example, Panther, tursiech Hunter or scorch but not Kira Metz, Schirü, or reaver scout) and reactive effect (so not ciri Nova or NG knight) should have an option Only as your last card to play face down as an ambush effect with a 1 turn timer. What this achieves is exchanging your zero point play on your 0th card with your single reactive last card. I know it's been mentioned that ambush would stay exclusively ST faction ability, but I don't think this suggestion changes that, no cards should get the ambush ability passively outside ST. This is just the best way to get use out of a reactive card in a (crucial) proactive last say situation, and it's not something we should deny to someone who needs to acquire a reactive stance to play their good card. We need to let people play to their archetype's advantage! Also it wouldn't be the first time a faction exclusive bled through to the rest of the game to the massive benefit of everyone (NR draw faction ability from TW3, NG mulligan faction ability from closed beta, SK grave cards like Hatori and Pauly or Brewess etc).
This is one problem I never read or hear anything about, but it's honestly the biggest reasons why coin flip has never been in a good spot, and why the balance in the control/macro/tempo triangle fluctuates so often. Admittedly, the extra draws on turn 3 soften this problem a little bit, but I think this ambush measure would actually close the book on the reactivity issue. In fact if you compare the solutions, the extra draws don't really address the problem and may turn out to heavily favour macro decks (as it would heavily favour neckers or greatswords today).
From what I can tell, the only problem in this package that will be properly dealt with in HC is dry passing and perhaps bleeding. For these solutions I am totally on board, but it seems to me like a quarter measure. While this is a step in the right direction (it's one of the bigger problem so it's a good step), it's not quite enough to solve the bag of issues. I'm trying to stay positive because I have loved gwent since my very first game in TW3, but it's important not to solve the problems by removing pieces of the puzzle. For example You can't just remove something like carryover or burst the power bubble because it puts a huge damper on diversity and design space, the advantages you have to play to, and the game starts to feel very homogenous again like before midwinter and gold immunity. We need to find a better balance between "returning to gwents roots" and "not scrapping good things to keep the game fun".
Thank you for reading! I care a lot about gwent and I'm not thrilled with the direction we're heading. If you think I'm wrong about something or Ive missed something, please don't keep it to yourself. I'm more interested with addressing the problems than I am being right about them.
=)
Additionally, I believe that leader initiative to decide the coin toss is completely avoiding the problem. This post does a really good job of highlighting the issues with initiative. Also, It seems like the extra mulligan(s) for blue coin is an attempt to offset turn one tempo to give blue a naturally better hand. But I think it has no real bearing on the problem and will have an extremely minimal impact. Extra mulligans would be much more impactful on turn 3 when the deck has less than 20 cards in it, but you can't just assign it to blue or red. I'd like to try and highlight the more recent ways HC suggest to deal with the issues of the coin toss, how effective it stands to be with the information we have, and provide some suggestions that would have a better impact on the issue.
Criteria
1. Reduce the potency of card advantage, but not eliminate it.
2. Players need to be impartial to the coin; reactivity and card advantage need a certain degree of separation. This is the problem I believe proposed solutions like Bidding, initiative, and phantom points cannot deal with.
3. Alleviate blue coin tempo requirement in some way.
4. Scalable with player skill, Not reverse the advantage at any MMR.
5. Not change any fundamental rules of the game or destroy healthy archetypes.
Problems
First round
-First issue, dry passing (hard committing to a reverse bleed for card advantage). Adding card limit to the hand is probably the best way to decentivize dry passing round 1, this is a great solution that very importantly doesn't interfere with your ability to dry pass round two, either to lessen a disadvantage, reclaim equal cards, or take an advantage for r3. Big thumbs up, but I'd like to add a school of thought. If you don't want somebody to dry pass r2, you should need to choose to establish carryover (more than them) to decentivise it.
-Second, low tempo/carryover (first round dynamics). Playing low tempo on blue lets your opponent get ahead of you and pass for 2 card advantage. Establishing carryover to block the dry pass is the only clean way out of a loosing round 1, and makes it okay that your cards are worth less because you can soft commit to a reverse bleed without sacrificing a crown or CA. More importantly, there needs to be SOME way to make it okay that your core is worth less than your opponents. These are important dynamics that TW3 gwent did not offer, and it looks like homecomings answer is to purge both macro and carryover. What's the point in playing a game without macro, It's like playing Starcraft without a keyboard. This may help with the bag of coin flip issues, but it leads to a really static game of who has more points, and no strategic advantage to play for. I think a better answer is to lean into the "carryover to counter tempo" strategy; have more cards like morkvarg that add some small measure of defence to later round/s. I've always loved that gwent feels like a very three dimensional game in that (for your proactive plays) you can play tall (tempo) wide (swarm) or forward/backwards (carryover/CA spies), but homecomings aim seems to be to remove wide and f/b, and shoot tall in the foot.
Second round
-third issue, over bleeding/ CA (card advantage) spies
Bleeding should always be a viable strategy. However there are permutations of any match where bleeding is too effective and lead to a guaranteed win. Part of the problem is the natural length of round three. Being able to control the length of round 3 is a very big advantage to be able to play for, and 3 card draws on R3 reduces the potency of bleeding which is a good thing. However, I think drawing 3 on R3 is actually dampening the specific problem too much, perhaps 2 draws would be perfect. But the other answer HC provides is removing CA spies, and if the cost is cutting a core strategy of gwent I think it's too high.
The real problem with spies-
CA spies will always be too good as is. Making a delay play with no future drawback is just inherently very strong in this 3 round format. As we learn from ciri in the tutorial "it's okay to loose a battle to win the war", and If you have the reach to overcome your negative point play, you can thoughtlessly force your opponent into a loose loose scenario. You can inflate or deflate the power meta to any level and we'll never find a good power for CA spies, but that doesn't mean it's time to throw in the towel on the entire strategy. Playing spy r1 needs to have a low tempo set up to make it more expensive to overcome, or a deeper cost than points in one round. It needs a fairly potent drawback if not compensated for, but no so potent that you can't compensate for it.
The way to bring balance to spies is to give them dynamic power, and to make them provide overcome-able carryover. In today's power meta, they should be 1 pt cards that strengthen based on the round (10,13,16), and have a turn end ability to spawn a 5pt token to turn 2 or 3. Also enough of this tutoring spy hyper thinning garbage. If you want to trade up on a spy you should have to play something low and proactive. If you want to tutor a spy it comes from marching orders, and with the downside that you trade down for the efficiency of marching orders.
Or alternatively; In homecoming there could be a new class of cards where any deck can only have 1 from the entire pool and the card is guaranteed in a specific round (similar to old bloody Barron, or how quest cards have been described to me from hearthstone). CA spies would fall into this pool, and other non CA cards would help carve out new breeds of decks. This system would also promote deck diversity because not every deck will want a spy more than something else they can guarantee, and not every deck will want a "quest" card at all if there's a greater provisional cost for including it.
Third round
-fourth issue, reactivity/Card advantage
Today reactive cards suffer in a short round and top deck situation if you don't have the reactive play. These cards would benefit massively from a way to delay their action; which reduces the potency of card advantage. My solution to the reactivity problem is this; Any card with both a discrete effect (for example, Panther, tursiech Hunter or scorch but not Kira Metz, Schirü, or reaver scout) and reactive effect (so not ciri Nova or NG knight) should have an option Only as your last card to play face down as an ambush effect with a 1 turn timer. What this achieves is exchanging your zero point play on your 0th card with your single reactive last card. I know it's been mentioned that ambush would stay exclusively ST faction ability, but I don't think this suggestion changes that, no cards should get the ambush ability passively outside ST. This is just the best way to get use out of a reactive card in a (crucial) proactive last say situation, and it's not something we should deny to someone who needs to acquire a reactive stance to play their good card. We need to let people play to their archetype's advantage! Also it wouldn't be the first time a faction exclusive bled through to the rest of the game to the massive benefit of everyone (NR draw faction ability from TW3, NG mulligan faction ability from closed beta, SK grave cards like Hatori and Pauly or Brewess etc).
This is one problem I never read or hear anything about, but it's honestly the biggest reasons why coin flip has never been in a good spot, and why the balance in the control/macro/tempo triangle fluctuates so often. Admittedly, the extra draws on turn 3 soften this problem a little bit, but I think this ambush measure would actually close the book on the reactivity issue. In fact if you compare the solutions, the extra draws don't really address the problem and may turn out to heavily favour macro decks (as it would heavily favour neckers or greatswords today).
From what I can tell, the only problem in this package that will be properly dealt with in HC is dry passing and perhaps bleeding. For these solutions I am totally on board, but it seems to me like a quarter measure. While this is a step in the right direction (it's one of the bigger problem so it's a good step), it's not quite enough to solve the bag of issues. I'm trying to stay positive because I have loved gwent since my very first game in TW3, but it's important not to solve the problems by removing pieces of the puzzle. For example You can't just remove something like carryover or burst the power bubble because it puts a huge damper on diversity and design space, the advantages you have to play to, and the game starts to feel very homogenous again like before midwinter and gold immunity. We need to find a better balance between "returning to gwents roots" and "not scrapping good things to keep the game fun".
Thank you for reading! I care a lot about gwent and I'm not thrilled with the direction we're heading. If you think I'm wrong about something or Ive missed something, please don't keep it to yourself. I'm more interested with addressing the problems than I am being right about them.
=)