I don't understand the Eskel+Vesemir+Lambert nerf.
Previously, this was a "9str unit" that cost 21 food + thin 2, which was fine enough to see play in most decks (because of the T1 alpha strike, esp if you add Roach to that)
=> now this is a "6str unit" that cost 24 food + thin 2.
The question is : does thin 2 cost 18 food (aka 18 str aka you need to bonify your deck by 18 when thinning).
=> I think Vesemir could be set at str 3 or 4, because that jumped from good cards to bad cards. You don't have alpha strike + this cost way too much food to consider even a good thinning solution.
=> that alpha strike was a 28 food investment. It is now a 34 food investiment that got nerf by 3str. aka by 9str.
At this point, this is not an educated nerf, it is a gamedesign decision.
The impact on the game without access to cheaper thinning is now Gwent transformed into a very randomized engine-land. This removed more skill and put randomized draws instead. Find a synergy, put lots of cards together and hope for RNG.
Add to this :
- +101 cards to the pool, meaning deck diversity you face is growing (so you need more stability to face this, unless you gamedesign dice + chifoumi and call this a strategy game).
- Birna Bran is thin 2 + str 5 but got nerfed by 1 food. Compared to Witchers, should she cost 23 "minus discards" ?
- Then you have Skalds that got -1str +1 food, putting them at 5 food => even in Bran this is Food negative. This is not normal.
- Roach +3 food nerf. Which is meh but still okay, I can understand.
Why not remove some food to Bran on top of this => welcome to Crimson random Curse, really.
That just killed Bran. Bran had good winrates, but not to the point to get like 10food nerfs like that. All previous deck got nerfed by 6 food, this is just... Wow.
The game need more thining solutions. Regular games can't roll through the full list, with a gold dillution of 1/25 and copper dillution of 2/25, coming from the regular boardgame industry where 1/15 is a 15 years norm, the game became really a dice thrower to say the least.
No tutors but combo moves that gives you like 10 or 20 str with two cards => this is the definition of random land.
Exemple :
- food cost of that card that buff +2str to 5 adjacent unit, outputting 10 str is 11. Okay, this is logical. Ignoring the 5 unit limitation, but let's say ok.
- food cost of that card that buff +10str to 1 unit is... 11. wtf, one unit ? Where is the difficulty of this, you can call this on the second card you play ?
I'm very disapointed by that extention. I'm trying to optimise a Bran list the best I can and result is low on each ressource, a deck that can't win regularly and basically stuck at "can't change stuff". This just nailed the game in a random drawing coffin I can't move out for me.
Bran is supposed to be the most stable guy, but it is stable to output low-level stuff OR play random OP engine decks that draws whatever stuff that synergy between themselves, and then buy a new 25 cards list if you want to change faction just for lulz because you construct your deck with over-speciallized cards and B&B cards are food negative for most decks now.
Why ? Are Bran W/R still in the high 70% now ? I was winning 2 games out of 3. I win now 2 games out of 5 or maybe 6. Put those W/R to 50/50 and you won't see me wondering what happened.