It is half a year since the release of Homecoming and a good time to review the state of the game as a whole.
I played Gwent since early closed Beta, having around 600 hours of play time in Gwent and thousands of hours more in other CCGs. After CDPR revealed Homecoming one year ago, I played all possible other card games: MTG, Artifact, Hearthstone, Yugioh, Faeria, KeyForge, and even Pokemon cards. All of those games are great (except Artifact maybe lol). But in my opinion, none of those games have the potential, that I saw and still see in Gwent.
In this thread, I want to discuss with you the most important problems that old Gwent had and think about how Homecoming tried to solve these problems and which new problems it created. Most importantly, I will introduce some ideas, how those problems could have been solved in Gwent differently, making it into a much better experience, as it ever was, without removing key concepts like silver spies, thinning and weather.
Let’s get started
The most important problems of Gwent were:
1. Card advantage: Unfair Coinflip and Silver Spies
Since early closed beta, one of the major issues of old Gwent was the unfairness of the coin flip. The player that started had a massive disadvantage. How should we “Fix the Coinflip”?
Another obvious problem was the silver spies. In high level old Gwent, it was mandatory to draw the spy to win the game. They were the most powerful cards and in the last Meta stages, the game was centered around playing those spies.
Since Homecoming, the starting player gets the artifact “Tactical Advantage”, and more mulligans. The problem with the silver spies was solved by removing them from the game. Although both problems have been solved by this, the complete removal of the silver spies, the probably most interesting card concepts of the game, does not feel satisfying.
My idea to solve this: Spies should be removed from the collections. Instead, the player who starts gets the factions silver spy in his hand as one of his 10 cards (the strength of the spy has to be adjusted to a fair, balanced value, of course).
I wonder why this easy move never appeared in the discussion. It solves both problems in an extremely elegant way. The first player has a risky opportunity to get back his card disadvantage and the game is fair, staying exciting and strategic at the same time.
2. Dry Passing
Dry Passing the second (or sometimes the first) round was probably the most common strategy in old Gwent. Most games had only 2 rounds being played. To return to the essence of a game where you want to play three rounds and win two of them CDPR wanted to do something against drypassing.
With Homecoming the players got a hand card limit. They successfully eliminated dry passing with this change….BUT
With the hand card limit, they created a lot of new problems, making the game (in my view) much less strategic, intuitive and fun to play. In Gwent, you used to wait for the one mistake of your opponent to punish him for getting card advantage and at the same time having the fear he might have tricked you and is getting the card advantage. In my opinion, the hand card limit (together with the removal of the silver spies) leads to a game where you do not really have to be afraid to get punished for your mistakes and it removes a lot of fun and excitement of the first two rounds. Getting or losing card advantage is almost impossible, making the game feel linear.
CDPR could just release cards that counter drypassing, instead of removing it from the game. For example , just one bronze card with the effect: “If the opponent passes and did not play any card this round, play this card from your hand” could be enough.
I think simply removing the hand limit would make the game already much better again.There were Metas in the history of Gwent where Drypassing was neither a big deal, nor a good turn. I am not sure if dry passing is a toxic mechanic at all or a healthy valuable possible turn.
3. Thinning was too powerful
In competitive old Gwent, the choice of which decks are playable were highly determined by their thinning potential. In order to get all of your gold cards and your finishing combo, you had to thin your deck, up to the last cards. The game was too much centered to the thinning.
In Homecoming, they removed the mechanic from the game with deleting most card effects that search for cards in the deck or making their provision costs extremely high.
The problem I have with this is: Thinning or searching for some cards from your deck was an incredibly fun and strategic mechanic. Your deck was more like a resource and you would try to get the right card at the right time out of your deck.
I do not think thinning should be removed from the game. Instead, the problem of thinning being overpowered can be simply solved with some new cards: Release some new card effects, to make thinning worse.
For example:
“Damage/Boost a Unit by 1 every time your opponent plays a card from the deck.”
“Boost self by 2 at the end of your turn, if you didn’t play any card from your deck this turn.”
“Deploy: Damage a unit/ Boost self by x, where x is the difference of cards in your deck and the opponents.”
4. The One card Round 3 finisher
Game plans in old Gwent were often quite similar. People would use the first two rounds to set up the last finisher, which was in most cases one or two buffed cards, Ciri-Nova or some other 1 or 2 card combo.
In Homecoming, the player draws 3 cards in the last round instead of 1, making the round longer, allowing different strategies than a one card finisher to be playable.
Also, the hand card limit and the additional 3 cards in the second round help to achieve that. This leads to the following problems.In old Gwent, you were forced to make your whole game plan in the beginning of the game, knowing that you will not draw much more than the cards you already have. In Homecoming it does not feel like I have to make my plan at the beginning already, because I will draw 6 more cards plus additional mulligans later on. Also, the number of turns and eventually the length of a game increases.
Still, I agree with letting the player draw additional cards in round three. But I don’t see the need to let them draw also more cards in round 2. How about a draw of +1/+2 , +0/+2, +1/+3 or +0/+3 (and maybe start with 9 cards plus leader in first round).
5. Rows and Weather feel unnecessary:
Old Witcher Gwint was all about weather and putting your units into the right rows. Still, there were lots of problems with weather in the long history of Gwent and the cards slowly changed from cards with fixed positions to flexible positions. At the same time, weather was nerfed again and again, making weather and rows feeling extremely unnecessary.
In Homecoming, CDPR decided to delete one row and create effects that only trigger in the melee or the ranged row. Also, they created the key word “reach”. With this, they wanted to simplify the game with deleting an unnecessary row and to give the remaining rows stronger meaning.
In my opinion, the attempt to give the rows a meaning, again, failed.
And about weather: They basically removed it from the game. There are some decks playing weather, but it is just a really unimportant side thing.
Here is my idea to fix this issue:
Let the game start with weather on the board. The melee Row may have a weather: “Every unit placed here gets boosted by 1” And the siege row has the Weather “Every unit placed here gets damaged by 1”.
This simple tweak gives rows and weather a meaning again. Players now can choose overextending the melee row for getting small boosts or playing to other rows.
You can also think about different fields with different starting weather. Also, there should be more weather manipulating effects, added to the game. Maybe it should be possible to have multiple weather effects at one row? And maybe first light should only be able to clear one row? And maybe more interesting Weather effects should be added? Maybe two frosts on a row combine to a really strong white frost? Maybe card effects that move a weather - maybe even from your row to the opponent row should be added? There are lots of different ideas to make rows and weather important and fun again!
Conclusion:
In conclusion, I respect the idea and the bravery to release Homecoming with the release of Gwent a lot. It was a risky decision and most publishers would have never had the courage to do that.
Homecoming also aimed to fix all the problems old Gwent had and it brought new features as well. Still, as I showed in my post, it fixed most problems with removing some of the most interesting features from the game, making the game a much less fun, exciting and strategic experience. (Compared to the release of HC the game is much better now though!) Also, I am not sure which target group Homecoming wanted to aim for, because it is less intuitive (bad for casual players) and less complex/strategic (bad for hardcore players).
Anyway, this post is not there to compare Homecoming to old Gwent but to point out that all the problems, Gwent used to have, could and can be solved by little but important changes as shown and some new card effects.
I honestly think CDProjectRed should consider going back to the rules of old Gwent, and also apply changes like suggested, “Keep the cool new features and interface and make it the best Collectable Card Game that exists!”
#MakeGwentGreatAgain
I played Gwent since early closed Beta, having around 600 hours of play time in Gwent and thousands of hours more in other CCGs. After CDPR revealed Homecoming one year ago, I played all possible other card games: MTG, Artifact, Hearthstone, Yugioh, Faeria, KeyForge, and even Pokemon cards. All of those games are great (except Artifact maybe lol). But in my opinion, none of those games have the potential, that I saw and still see in Gwent.
In this thread, I want to discuss with you the most important problems that old Gwent had and think about how Homecoming tried to solve these problems and which new problems it created. Most importantly, I will introduce some ideas, how those problems could have been solved in Gwent differently, making it into a much better experience, as it ever was, without removing key concepts like silver spies, thinning and weather.
Let’s get started
The most important problems of Gwent were:
- Card Advantage: Unfair Coinflip and Silver Spies
- Dry Passing
- Thinning
- The One card Round 3 finisher
- Rows and Weather
1. Card advantage: Unfair Coinflip and Silver Spies
Since early closed beta, one of the major issues of old Gwent was the unfairness of the coin flip. The player that started had a massive disadvantage. How should we “Fix the Coinflip”?
Another obvious problem was the silver spies. In high level old Gwent, it was mandatory to draw the spy to win the game. They were the most powerful cards and in the last Meta stages, the game was centered around playing those spies.
Since Homecoming, the starting player gets the artifact “Tactical Advantage”, and more mulligans. The problem with the silver spies was solved by removing them from the game. Although both problems have been solved by this, the complete removal of the silver spies, the probably most interesting card concepts of the game, does not feel satisfying.
My idea to solve this: Spies should be removed from the collections. Instead, the player who starts gets the factions silver spy in his hand as one of his 10 cards (the strength of the spy has to be adjusted to a fair, balanced value, of course).
I wonder why this easy move never appeared in the discussion. It solves both problems in an extremely elegant way. The first player has a risky opportunity to get back his card disadvantage and the game is fair, staying exciting and strategic at the same time.
2. Dry Passing
Dry Passing the second (or sometimes the first) round was probably the most common strategy in old Gwent. Most games had only 2 rounds being played. To return to the essence of a game where you want to play three rounds and win two of them CDPR wanted to do something against drypassing.
With Homecoming the players got a hand card limit. They successfully eliminated dry passing with this change….BUT
With the hand card limit, they created a lot of new problems, making the game (in my view) much less strategic, intuitive and fun to play. In Gwent, you used to wait for the one mistake of your opponent to punish him for getting card advantage and at the same time having the fear he might have tricked you and is getting the card advantage. In my opinion, the hand card limit (together with the removal of the silver spies) leads to a game where you do not really have to be afraid to get punished for your mistakes and it removes a lot of fun and excitement of the first two rounds. Getting or losing card advantage is almost impossible, making the game feel linear.
CDPR could just release cards that counter drypassing, instead of removing it from the game. For example , just one bronze card with the effect: “If the opponent passes and did not play any card this round, play this card from your hand” could be enough.
I think simply removing the hand limit would make the game already much better again.There were Metas in the history of Gwent where Drypassing was neither a big deal, nor a good turn. I am not sure if dry passing is a toxic mechanic at all or a healthy valuable possible turn.
3. Thinning was too powerful
In competitive old Gwent, the choice of which decks are playable were highly determined by their thinning potential. In order to get all of your gold cards and your finishing combo, you had to thin your deck, up to the last cards. The game was too much centered to the thinning.
In Homecoming, they removed the mechanic from the game with deleting most card effects that search for cards in the deck or making their provision costs extremely high.
The problem I have with this is: Thinning or searching for some cards from your deck was an incredibly fun and strategic mechanic. Your deck was more like a resource and you would try to get the right card at the right time out of your deck.
I do not think thinning should be removed from the game. Instead, the problem of thinning being overpowered can be simply solved with some new cards: Release some new card effects, to make thinning worse.
For example:
“Damage/Boost a Unit by 1 every time your opponent plays a card from the deck.”
“Boost self by 2 at the end of your turn, if you didn’t play any card from your deck this turn.”
“Deploy: Damage a unit/ Boost self by x, where x is the difference of cards in your deck and the opponents.”
4. The One card Round 3 finisher
Game plans in old Gwent were often quite similar. People would use the first two rounds to set up the last finisher, which was in most cases one or two buffed cards, Ciri-Nova or some other 1 or 2 card combo.
In Homecoming, the player draws 3 cards in the last round instead of 1, making the round longer, allowing different strategies than a one card finisher to be playable.
Also, the hand card limit and the additional 3 cards in the second round help to achieve that. This leads to the following problems.In old Gwent, you were forced to make your whole game plan in the beginning of the game, knowing that you will not draw much more than the cards you already have. In Homecoming it does not feel like I have to make my plan at the beginning already, because I will draw 6 more cards plus additional mulligans later on. Also, the number of turns and eventually the length of a game increases.
Still, I agree with letting the player draw additional cards in round three. But I don’t see the need to let them draw also more cards in round 2. How about a draw of +1/+2 , +0/+2, +1/+3 or +0/+3 (and maybe start with 9 cards plus leader in first round).
5. Rows and Weather feel unnecessary:
Old Witcher Gwint was all about weather and putting your units into the right rows. Still, there were lots of problems with weather in the long history of Gwent and the cards slowly changed from cards with fixed positions to flexible positions. At the same time, weather was nerfed again and again, making weather and rows feeling extremely unnecessary.
In Homecoming, CDPR decided to delete one row and create effects that only trigger in the melee or the ranged row. Also, they created the key word “reach”. With this, they wanted to simplify the game with deleting an unnecessary row and to give the remaining rows stronger meaning.
In my opinion, the attempt to give the rows a meaning, again, failed.
And about weather: They basically removed it from the game. There are some decks playing weather, but it is just a really unimportant side thing.
Here is my idea to fix this issue:
Let the game start with weather on the board. The melee Row may have a weather: “Every unit placed here gets boosted by 1” And the siege row has the Weather “Every unit placed here gets damaged by 1”.
This simple tweak gives rows and weather a meaning again. Players now can choose overextending the melee row for getting small boosts or playing to other rows.
You can also think about different fields with different starting weather. Also, there should be more weather manipulating effects, added to the game. Maybe it should be possible to have multiple weather effects at one row? And maybe first light should only be able to clear one row? And maybe more interesting Weather effects should be added? Maybe two frosts on a row combine to a really strong white frost? Maybe card effects that move a weather - maybe even from your row to the opponent row should be added? There are lots of different ideas to make rows and weather important and fun again!
Conclusion:
In conclusion, I respect the idea and the bravery to release Homecoming with the release of Gwent a lot. It was a risky decision and most publishers would have never had the courage to do that.
Homecoming also aimed to fix all the problems old Gwent had and it brought new features as well. Still, as I showed in my post, it fixed most problems with removing some of the most interesting features from the game, making the game a much less fun, exciting and strategic experience. (Compared to the release of HC the game is much better now though!) Also, I am not sure which target group Homecoming wanted to aim for, because it is less intuitive (bad for casual players) and less complex/strategic (bad for hardcore players).
Anyway, this post is not there to compare Homecoming to old Gwent but to point out that all the problems, Gwent used to have, could and can be solved by little but important changes as shown and some new card effects.
I honestly think CDProjectRed should consider going back to the rules of old Gwent, and also apply changes like suggested, “Keep the cool new features and interface and make it the best Collectable Card Game that exists!”
#MakeGwentGreatAgain
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