It sure was, and not only because of the card play, but it also had great music, great voice acting, great backstory and great graphics. Like actual tidy looking grown up card game graphics, not the blinky messy cartoon graphics like other card games.
Brings me right back to the control era of the game (post-homecoming), when provision and card value was actually respected, and many players played control decks. But what have you when the main Geralt card becomes worthless and the "giant" card is "nothing"?
Anyhow, the game was pretty great at that point, a solid card game, and a great collection game, including the graphics of the cards etc, and accessibility. That was how the game was monetized mostly. I think this is where they took a wrong turn.
The game more and more became about "new cards", and people hyping new sets of cards etc, something the game didn't strictly need. But probably for montary reasons, it was seen as a good way to monetize the game. However, it was rather part of making the problem, as new sets of cards just made the game unreliable, and eventually out of control and unmanagable. They introduced new cards to quickly without thinking about balance, cost, provisions, cause/effects and etc etc.
Another alternative would have to been to charge "serious" players a monthly subscription fee. Let players play the game for free etc, up until a certain amount of matches per month. Once players become dedicated and play alot of matches, most should be willing to pay to play the game. If that was the case, the developers would have had alot more time to think through the balance of the game, and adding new cards. Alot of people said homecoming was a huge change in the game, but I think the change from CONTROL to post-control was also a huge change. It was almost an entirely different game (one that I personally didn't like anymore). And nobody was talking about game balance anymore, all they were talking about and focused on were new cards, and the "need" for new cards. But there was no actual need for new cards. New cards could have been cool, if they had worked with the old game, not changed the game into another game entirely.
Also other things changed that were good before. It was just too much of everything. Leaders were good before, but then they changed it, just to introduce new things. There was always some pressure it seems to introduce new things, even so much so that they forgot the old saying "if it ain't broken, don't fix it". They strayed too far away from what WAS the core concept of the game, and it just continued like that and was a complete chaos in the end (that I observed, until I stopped observing). Even if you had 10 main Geralt cards, it wouldn't have mattered, because people would just keep throwing points on there that would make any previous giant blush.