Game Idea: Sideboard

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Game Idea: Sideboard

I've mentioned it in one or two posts before and the more I think about it the more I am certain that being able to Sideboard would change the position of "uber" decks drastically. In case you don't know what I mean: You build your deck as usual from 25 cards and have let's say 6 extra cards on the side. Before the match begins when you see which Leader your opponent is playing, you get 60 seconds to exchange some cards from the deck with some from the sideboard.

I don't need 3 First Lights when I play against NR but it sure helps to have them against Dagon. Your opponent playes SK? Let's move some griffins from the sideboard to your deck. You see your opponent playing ST? Move some weather cards to your deck (and still a good portion of luck until the devs give us more counters). I'd love to see this kind of flexibility in Gwent.

Thoughts?
 
So it's basically an extra mulligan, only you can select from six cards instead of getting a random one. And I suppose people aren't going to put silver and gold cards in the sideboard? That leaves the question as to how many cards you can exchange with the sideboard? Three? All six? Basically what you want is the guarantee to have a set amount of cards to play against certain opponents. I think this might actually make the play even more stale, because you are always guaranteed to have those cards and you don't have to make a plan in case you don't get them.

Incidentally, you really can't guess the opponent's tactic from their leader. For example getting Dagon doesn't guarantee a weather deck and you might actually shoot yourself in the foot if you take the wrong cards.
 
Sideboard promotes counter play, which I'm not a fan of. The deck itself should be able to function without trying to have specific cards against a opponent’s particular deck.
 
First off, this idea comes from Magic The Gathering where you have 60 cards in the deck and 15 in the sideboard. You only see what colors the opponent plays and have to guess from this. There are only 5 colors and over 15'000 cards, to guess from this what your opponent will play is far more difficult than based on the Leader in Gwent. And still, no competitive deck comes without a sideboard because even with as little information as which color your opponent plays you can adjust the deck accordingly.

In Gwent the amount of possible strategies your opponent can play with a given leader is by far more limited. A good sideboard will be general enough to help you in many situations but won't leave you hanging without pants just because you sideboarded the wrong cards. First Light can still be used for drawing units even if your opponent does not play Weather with Dagon but when he is, you'll be prepared without wasting 3 slots permanently on FL.

About what you can sideboard: and idea would be 1 Gold, 2 Silver and 3 Bronze or 6 cards of whatever you want, can be 6 Golds. At it's current state the latter would be fine because you won't find 6 additional golds that would change your deck in a meaningful way depending on the situation, it's more likely you have the 4 best gold already in the deck. When more cards will be introduced, the former might be a needed restriction. But limitations in the deck would remain, you can have only 4 gold and 6 silver in the deck after sideboarding.

[EDIT]: oh I completely forgot one crucial thing about Sideboarding in MTG because I haven't played tournaments for quite a while: matches in MTG have also 3 rounds and your are allowed to sideboard between the rounds. This wouldn't be applicable to Gwent because "our" rounds do not continue with a fresh deck, but given the more limited amount of different tactics an opponent has to play in his faction/leader, I don't see this as a real problem.
 
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So you exchange the cards from the sideboard with cards in your deck (not your hand). That could eventually work once we've gotten more cards and new mechanics and not everyone is playing the same 2 decks.

At the moment, it seems to be overkill. In the future, it might be nice.
 
A sideboard would be used before shuffle and hand draw - it's an exchange of deck contents before anything else happens. In other games, where the whole deck is used in each game of a best 2out of 3, the first game is played without modification and you can exchange cards 1:1 with the sideboard before games 2 and 3. Since Gwent 1 one game with best 2 out of 3 rounds, it would have to happen before Round 1.

That said, I don;t like the idea of a sideboard in Gwent. If they wanted to make a separate play area that had them then I could just ignore it, but I would not like to see all Gwent be sideboard based. Like 4RM3D said, the point of a sideboard is to have already played 1 game (and have seen the deck's archetype, if not many of the cards in the deck - depending on how long game 1 lasted) and exchange for game 2 and 3. Trying to exchange based only on faction and leader is a good way to mess up your own game plan. Also, part of the beauty of Gwent is that, in deckbuilding, you won;t really know what you might face and need to be versatile enough to handle many different strategies by the opponent. Currently, players are fairly easily punished for going all-in on strategies (which is part of why the super-buff Trebuchet, Adrenaline Rush, Promote deck died). Adding a sideboard just reinforces the all-in strategy with no need to diversify since you can rely on a couple cards you will swap every game for silver bullets. Silver bullets, admittedly, will bring down a strategy or three, but just give rise to new (and likely worse) offenders that are even harder to deal with in the new "Sideboard" era. You are just trading players feeling bad about not being able to stop "Deck X" for players feeling bad about not being able to play their own deck because everything they do is countered or being upset about "sideboarding X, but I never draw it so why sideboard".

It's a rabbit hole I don't think will end well for the game.
 
Treamayne;n7602020 said:
Adding a sideboard just reinforces the all-in strategy with no need to diversify since you can rely on a couple cards you will swap every game for silver bullets. Silver bullets, admittedly, will bring down a strategy or three, but just give rise to new (and likely worse) offenders that are even harder to deal with in the new "Sideboard" era.
I think the opposite would be the case, you wouldn't build a pure weather deck anymore or an SK deck depending solely on your graveyard, I believe decks would be more generalized with different multiple micro-strategies build in, e.g. playing fog/aard in a non-weather deck, some discard effects in the same deck and so on.

 
milosh69;n7602130 said:
I think the opposite would be the case, you wouldn't build a pure weather deck anymore or an SK deck depending solely on your graveyard, I believe decks would be more generalized with different multiple micro-strategies build in, e.g. playing fog/aard in a non-weather deck, some discard effects in the same deck and so on.

Well, that would depend on how many more ways we get to protect our strategies. There are already a few, and more expected to come. Why not go all in on <deck X> if I can see you are playing <Y> and I know I can sideboard in the things needed to protect against the most common threats you pose to my strategy. After all, even in MtG, sideboards have always had the dual purpose of both countering an opponent's strategy and protecting your own. Example: If I know you are creature based with lots of EtB and flickering, I'm going to sideboard Torper Orb - it stops your shenanigans and protects me from you ETB - Destroy X threats. I transitioned to Tribal Wars, Rainbow Stairwell and EDH a decade ago to escape the competitive sideboard shenanigans in MtG for a reason (started playing in 94 - went casual only in 06).

Sideboards may sound good now, but as the game grows it will probably become a nightmare. As I said above, if they want a separate section for them, go for it. Give it a try. But please don't throw all of Gwent down that rabbit hole.
 
Sideboard would so much limit the new card ideas that I would really not like to see it even tried now.
It would more or less make all the barely usable situational tech cards super solid.
Not a good way to go with a card game in beta.
 
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Not a fan of this idea. I agree with 4RM3D that it might make less interesting if you're guaranteed to always have a number of effective counters in your deck no matter what your opp is playing. I would rather the devs just work on designing a balanced meta.
 
I have to bring this up again, now with cards like Blizzard Potion or Quen a sideboard is very much needed. Yesterday I was quite hyped by BP because I encountered alot of other weather players. Today I play almost only against NR or ST where I ended up often with 2 or more useless BP's in my hand. So I decided to remove it from my deck again only to face Monster player after Monster player afterwards where I wished I would still have it in my deck argh.

It's situational cards like this which would profite hugely from a sideboard. Knowing which faction/leader my opponent is playing before the match starts would be enough to make an informed decision about keeping BP in my deck or throw out Quen for the match when I suspect the SK opponent playing self-mutilation.
 
milosh69;n7721350 said:
where I ended up often with 2 or more useless BP's in my hand

This is faulty game design in the same way Clear Skies used to be useless against non-weather. BP should be combined with another (potion) card.
 
milosh69;n7721350 said:
I have to bring this up again, now with cards like Blizzard Potion or Quen a sideboard is very much needed. Yesterday I was quite hyped by BP because I encountered alot of other weather players. Today I play almost only against NR or ST where I ended up often with 2 or more useless BP's in my hand. So I decided to remove it from my deck again only to face Monster player after Monster player afterwards where I wished I would still have it in my deck argh.

It's situational cards like this which would profite hugely from a sideboard. Knowing which faction/leader my opponent is playing before the match starts would be enough to make an informed decision about keeping BP in my deck or throw out Quen for the match when I suspect the SK opponent playing self-mutilation.

Currently I run blizzard potions with my NG deck instead of First Lights for a change. Though NG having the advantage of extra mulligan helps a lot in throwing those potions off when not needed.

On the other hand, the latest patch gave a rise to weather decks once again and it got trickier to deal with them.
 
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Indeed Blizzard potions are awesome against weather decks and useless against the rest. Same problem First Light had. They should get some alternate effect (e.g. a minor boost like +1str to all units in play).
 
The side board idea can be good I think if the game change into a BO3 duel.
If not then build a deck without 3 copies of a card that can be dead in some matchups.

You said Magic have sideboard only because it's Bo3 or Bo5 games. In single duel, like in multiplayer variance of Magic there is no sideboard.

As it's been said you can't know for sure what your opponent will play. So it's bringing a totally new, time losing, heavy programming feature to the game that will just resume in being a poker play. All of that to make sure we can get ride of bad build decisions.

With decks we have good and bad matchups, the rest is just luck on having those more often than not.
 
this idea only really works for match-based games; gwent is not one of them.
(if it were, you'd have to choose between side-decks and having other decks entirely [as is the case in hearthstone, for instance] and i'd probably choose the latter, since it fits the game better)

i don't think gwent is supposed to be a counter-play based game... but rather tailoring your deck to face most situations you might find. clear skies might not be as good against non-weather deck, but it still allows you to dig much faster through your deck, which is always nice; and other tech cards would be better off following this style.
 
Well it's simple: without a Sideboard of any form, situational cards like Blizzard Potion have no place in a competitive deck unless you are willing to play with a less-than-ideal deck against many opponents.
 
milosh69;n7730920 said:
Well it's simple: without a Sideboard of any form, situational cards like Blizzard Potion have no place in a competitive deck unless you are willing to play with a less-than-ideal deck against many opponents.

To be honest in a card game not every card as to be playable.
There has to be bad cards in order to have good cards, that's simple.
If it's not worth it to play blizzard potion in the game right now then don't play it. It's better than asking for a sideboard that will totally change the game just to play bad situational cards.
 
Where you can be confused is that the CDPR team said they implemented blizzard potion to fight against weather decks.
But hey! what do they know about card games right? They just added an useless card to the game.
 
Bonogringo;n7731820 said:
Where you can be confused is that the CDPR team said they implemented blizzard potion to fight against weather decks.
But hey! what do they know about card games right? They just added an useless card to the game.
so what good is it against a polished ST or SK deck when they don't use any weather immune units? BP in particular is most useful in playing against monsters and maybe SK pirate decks, that's it. It's fine they made something against weather (or for weather) but in the long term if you want to play on high ranks this card will bite you in the behind more often than it will help you to win. But when you encounter a monster player it will be worth gold. Mathematically though it's not worth putting it into your deck unless they add an additional effect as was suggested in another thread. Or they just let us sideboard.

Actually I'd have an idea for a sideboard mechanic maybe most can agree on: When we redraw at the beginning of the match, the cards we redraw will not go back to your deck but be banished. Say I'd pick up two of my three BP's when playing against ST, I banish them and draw two new cards from my deck. When I play against monsters though I'll keep them. This could be made optional, you can choose while redrawing if you want to banish or keep the not wanted cards in the deck on a per-card-basis. Of course this would only be allowed on the beginning of the match, redraws during the match would work the same as they do now.

Sounds more complicated than it actually is, just two buttons above each card are needed during redraw ;)
 
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