Is deck building with Nilfgaard difficult for anybody else?

[Juuto]

Is deck building with Nilfgaard difficult for anybody else?

It just feels like you can't do much outside of the box with Nilfgaard. I know Handbuff has become a thing/meme but outside of that, I just look at the Nilfgaard bronzes and I just don't know what I can even do with those cards without hard committing to a generic archetype in order for them to be any good at all. They feel too inflexible or too weak which is such a shame for a faction with some pretty cool Gold and Silver cards.

 

[Therealmorkvarg]

Exactly my thoughts been experimenting with builds all day with nilfgaard, reveal ciri nova and 15 point viper damage were my only success. I tried strengthen leader into cahir, tried reveal mix ups, knights with scorpions, item decks, resilience, draw card, crows eye novices, reflection deck as in shilard, sum circle, slaves, johnny with emhyr, blue dream, avallach sage, all too no success. Have to be down to the point handbuff, reveal, spys or alchemy and right now i only consistenly win with alchemy but i find it oh so boring, i even played with vipers doing 25 damage and won consistenly but found it very boring. There is just no room to experiment and my main fun in the game right now is experimenting due to the meta being so bloody stale. Actually very annoyed with the past 3 months of gwent cut down my playtime by 90% and when i get around to playing for that 10% i remember how dissappointed i am and to why i took a break in the first place. Arena is good! But still.. eh i just do it for the ore got myself 5k + of ore and over 30 kegs 6 golds and 4k transmute from arena so extremely satisfied, just sucks that i got nothing to spend it on xD most current cards make me yawn but maybe i just played too much! Maybe the break is well needed. (I hope cyprian wiley gets changed! Hes got amazing card art but currently too situational)

 

[Snake_Foxhounder]

Because spies are dead and a lot of their cards cater to that. The only truly viable archetype is alchemy. Reveal is a gimmick at best.

 

[Khreygond]

Reveal is an ok casual deck, its main problem is that it is the opposite of axemen: Huge power in the beginning, which gradually falls, and so do the options you have. If you draw new cards (using Daerlan and Avallac'h/Albrich/Shilard and the like) early on, you increase your options, but the problem is that later on when you have to go first, you won't have a target for your fire scorpions. If you do the opposite, reveal the fire scorpions first, it's very likely you won't have a target for them too early either, not to mention you can't control what the daerlan will draw you later on, which decreases your options.

Axemen have low power in the beginning which progressively gets out of hand, it's literally the opposite.

Anyway, to answer your question, yes. NG is one of the hardest factions to build an efficient deck with. Reveal is meh for casual and low ranks, it performs satisfactorily, Spies are worse than Reveal and as said, the only truly Tier 1 deck is Alchemy.

 

[Voyagers]

I agree this is why people need to be take this into account when saying "nerf viper witchers" etc this would essentially take away NGs only viable archetype. It is a shame that they nerfed spies so much that it is no longer viable it used to be one of my favorite decks to play since you actually have to think about each move for the most optimal points and not just slam down high point units turn after turn. Also I liked playing vs spies too as you need to get the balance right of when to pass vs them before their engines overwhelm you.

 

[Juuto]

I'm glad that other people find issues with Nilfgaard right now. In the same way that Wild Hunt is very separated from Monsters, Nilfgaard factions are very separated from each other. There's really no crossover potential for the Nilfgaard bronzes. They don't work together at all.

For Monsters, Moonlight benefits both Beasts and the future Vampire archetype. That's flexibility. A Nilfgaard silver, Sweers, also works on both revealed cards in hand or units on the board. He's a very valuable card either way and that's an example that a lot of Nilfgaard cards (especially the Bronzes) need to follow. The new Create silvers for Nilfgaard just feel awful to play because there's absolutely no way you can activate 90% those cards for any decent amount of value.

 

[Eamalin1]

srsly the enforcer nerf was the most stupid thing i've seent the balancing team do for quite some time exept for the whole thinking create was a good idea(looking at you uma, stone)

 

[partci]

srsly the enforcer nerf was the most stupid thing i've seent the balancing team do...

Oh, yes, cause dropping two Bronze cards at the end of the round for over 20 points tempo swing was so balanced...

Please.

 

[Eamalin1]

Oh, yes, cause dropping two Bronze cards at the end of the round for over 20 points tempo swing was so balanced...

Please.

umm no that was the old old enforcer mister nilfgaard hater, i am talking about the one that only proced when Spies were played same turn and Spies were tier 2 deck but i suppose a skellige player with his massrezes and greatswords would be mad at even the mention of Another nilfgaard archetype being viable. Hey just cause you guys are stuck with noskill bears/boats don't mean Spies should stay unplayable

 

[Eamalin1]

Oh, yes, cause dropping two Bronze cards at the end of the round for over 20 points tempo swing was so balanced...

Please.

hahah and you Think 20+ easy cursed units or greatswords are fine? please

 

[partci]

Eamalin1 Yeah, I'm main SK.

Good luck with your fantasy land.

 

[Eamalin1]

Eamalin1 Yeah, I'm main SK.

Good luck with your fantasy land.

can't wait until your precious faction get's nerfed to the ground, no more rez spamming bear spamming or no skill plays

 

[Draconifors]

Please, don't turn this into a personal dispute.
It's fine to disagree with others, but it is not fine to ridicule them.

 

[Eredain-4]

Is obvious that this time around Gwent is having a lot of problems, bug and unbalanced cards. I loved my Emhyr´s deck with Enforcers and so on, but they brutally nerfed the Enforcers, while new OP decks were developed ( Sword-Longships, Elf-point spam, etc). Thus I´m looking forward to the next update which ( I trust) will improve many things.

 

[Sargarth]

Yeah, it's been bothering me several months already. NG cant have any midrange value deck as there are no good value bronzes that work well on their own, compared to what bronzes ST has (ST Shupe deck being so competetive proves that). NG is forced into archetypes way more than any other faction and deckbuilding for NG is very different because of that: other faction competetive decks are usually about fitting best packages into the deck (for example: Bran discard package + cursed + ships packages, Brouver coinflip abuse package + mulligan package, etc) when NG decks cant be built with packages, only whole decks. The only exception for NG is Letho + Regis package, but this is a kind of package that needs the whole deck to be built around it, so it's not exactly a package imo.

 

[Khreygond]

OP is a matter of perspective. Compared to the meta, nothing is OP right now. All of them have exploitable weaknesses.

Greatswords are a bit boring and linear to play against but that's about it for me.

partci's suggestion about enforcers might be the best middle ground we can find. But generally I am against the change in general, I liked the enforcers when they were retroactive for the simple reason that while in a utopian meta (or just pre-midwinter) they'd be too powerful, in the meta where point spam replaced engines (dwarves, bears, etc), removal was not such a big deal. This is proven by the meta reports, as spies had a winrate lower than 50%, and were dominated HARD by Dwarves, Eithne, Machines and Bears, while Alchemy and Reveal also stood a decent chance against them, the former due to vipers and the latter due to scorch abuse.

As such, the change in retroactivity nerfed a Tier 2 deck (check every meta report since midwinter. Spies were nowhere near as good as the top tier decks) to the ground. In my opinion, the point spam problem should have been solved BEFORE the removal problem. Changing the importance of locks, the function of vipers and then the enforcers to promote a healthy interactive strategy. As it stands now, we have a meta in which spies just don't fit. They only barely fitted before. That's all

Reveal needs to go back to the drawing board, the way it works is just counter-intuitive, it will never be viable as long as it's so reliant on the hand and a decent draw. You cannot include deck-to-board thinners (Joachim De Wett, Vilgefortz, even Last Wish can be dangerous) as they will always have at least one bad option (Fire Scorpions, Golems if used early, Daerlan).

Vipers would, in a Utopian setting, better function differently, but right now, they are the ONLY Nilfgaard viable deck for competitive laddering. Fix the point spam and excessive Skellige revivals first and THEN we must look into changing Vipers. By all means. This will need to happen. But not now. Gwent is a game in which you can't change one thing and leave everything else untouched at this point. Changing Vipers when the game is as it is right now, literally means killing the faction and its only viable deck. It's certainly not the only thing that needs to happen for all you pre-midwinter nostalgics, if we are to get the game we'd all like to have.

 

[Juuto]

With the announcement of Homecoming, I seriously wish this whole reboot of GWENT includes a hard look at Nilfgaard. It's seriously such a shame looking at Nilfgaard and seeing how much the faction has been poorly thought through. There have been so many patches and so many sets of new cards and Nilfgaard still feels so underwhelming (not talking about in strength.)

It's like new cards are introduced but they don't do that much to actually address the issues with decks. It's just cards introduced that seem cool on paper until everyone realizes that cards aren't fun in dead and poorly supported archetypes. Reveal is still garbage and Mill has been nerfed to the ground to the point it still heavily struggles in the generic game of Tutor Spam GWENT. Some people are finding some success with Spies which is great because it's the one non-boring archetype that hasn't been completely destroyed. It's just so funny to me that the two archetypes that CDPR tried to push onto Nilfgaard (Soldier, Alchemy) have got to be the absolute most mindnumbingly boring decks in the game. They legitimately represent everything wrong with GWENT at the moment in the best/worst possible ways.

I just remember a time where I didn't have to struggle so hard to find a GWENT deck that I enjoyed. Everything I enjoyed was killed by CDPR in one way or another. Despite all of this, I am optimistic because there's simply no other hope for this game outside of something as big as Homecoming.