Cool theme for an expansion. Absolutely loved Hearts of Stone. I was hoping for a Wild Hunt expansion, but this is a great theme too. Gotta say, I love the idea of veil. Maybe as long as poison exists we can put veil on everything
but really, I think if you want certain cards to have a chance at being viable a keyword like this is needed. I don't like the concept of defender because it's too broad/powerful of a protective layer, but I don't mind specific cards having this keyword. For instance, I'd be fine with a super low power card like Mourntart having it.
Master Mirror's ability also seems interesting and makes me nostalgic to the old Johnny card. The rupture keyword.. Idk. I'm pretty put off from control and removal in Homecoming, but let's see how this works out. It seems at least you'll be able to play around it. The bad news is you play around it with a purify card, which you'll seemingly need 50 of nowadays.
Really like the veteran keyword. Glad to see they're (very slowly) allowing for a little bit of fun and playing around with base strength again, now just bring back old Imlerith Sabbath
Playing with carry-over in mind is an aspect I've always loved in Gwent.
The devotion keyword is also something I love. Gives deck building another aspect to keep in mind, while giving some strong tools for people that avoid neutrals (so certain strong tutors/tech cards etc) Gotta say, I'm very positively surprised by all this.
If this is a new consistent direction for the game to go in then my optimism is finally going up. Since we lost the concept of a 'Ciri Nova' deck I hope they make devotion worthwhile enough to see a good share of 'devotion decks'
Evolution too is just an idea that sounds really cool. Including the changing art work of the card. This expansion looks like it'll make the game significantly more interesting and I appreciate that. It seems a lot of effort went into it. I feel like the game desperately needs it. Which is why for this month I'll be sitting out though, because the game as is has gotten pretty stale for me. Especially as there are no (balance) changes at all for this month (?)
I hope that they also start looking at older cards and applying these keywords to them. For example, certain cards could use armour but they haven't (to my knowledge) gone back to actually give this useful mechanic to the old card pool.
Also something about the new spying cards that worries me is an issue I've brought up before, the row limits. You can fit 9 cards a row. If your opponent places a bunch of stuff on your side of the board you could be unable to play any more cards with like four turns to go. I would like to see this increased to at least ten a row.