Mahakam volunteers - in one of my games their ability activated when the opponent played them on the ranged row.
Franceska has voicelines from Eithne (talks about Brokilon).
Overall not many synergies within one archetype (maybe too early to tell), it seems that none of them have enough cards to be fully completed.
Since there are almost no tutors, one of the main ways to access your deck is through mulligans, and quite a lot of leaders have just one or two of them available when on red coin. if the overall number of mulligans increased it would help with consistency. I have managed to play 4 or 5 games with Franceska (1 or 2 mulligans and no cards that thin) and have had some cards in my deck that I have never got in my hand in those games.
While on the subject of leaders, their abilities seem to be all over the place. Some of them have really interesting ones, while others are too generic and of varying power levels (an Usurper is just bad.). Eithne for instance is 1x4 damage every round, while Brouver is 3x move a unit and damage/buff it which is is two times less power, but can block units with row specific orders. Unfortunately there is no units that benefit from being moved around, or being on the board when others are moved (something like gain one order when another unit is moved, damage an enemy card when it is moved, etc.), it seems like a missed opportunity to create an archetype that plays with this mechanic. Leaders with generic damage/boost abilities should be changed (Adda, Eredin, Eithne, Brouver, Harald, Filavandrel, etc.. if there is no card synergies to be created by any of these leaders). GG for giving Francesca her ability!
Overall, the game feels a bit slow, the animations of abilities seem fine, but cards hitting the board should be sped up by maybe 15-25%).
There is absolutely no reasoning as to why there are cards like Gascon and Angouleme (gg for putting her in the game!!!) in the game, they are not viable, competitive or good in any way. With so many interesting abilities from the past two years over several iterations of the game, somebody thought that cards with bad designs like these should be in the game. Some cards that shouldn't need to resolve their abilities randomly are doing them in this way.
While on the topic of card design, you should try using the best that the current and previous versions offer (they are balanced (usually), very tested and at times provide better synergies in the player's deck which is needed in the PTR version. Although there are some really good interesting and synergistic decks in the PTR as well, don't waste two years of beta testing and just rework everything (again). Artifacts are also a welcome design.
Some QoL improvements are needed, like when hovering over the deck or graveyard piles it should show how many cards are in there (if it isn't somewhere on the board at all times), better history of cards that were played (if a card that thins was played, it should show what card it thinned - Card 1 -> Card 2, if it damaged, boosted, destroyed or resets one card or row on deploy it should also show which card or row it did its ability on, when where trap cards activated, etc..). There are quite a lot of improvements that could be done in this regard. Better card descriptions, and more tags should be implemented (Fiend is a relict FYI, but it could have both tags). Also fixing missing descriptions (i.e. Ivo of Belhaven has 1 reach but it doesn't say that anywhere). Artifacts and special cards should have their respective tags, since when you search for them in the deck builder this way, they do not appear.
Hand size limit should maybe be reconsidered, since someone on red coin can play down to 4 cards in round one (if opponent passed earlier), and negate in that way any card advantage cards that the blue player played (i.e. Ciri).
Visually the game looks great, but is a bit too dark for my liking. Going back to the "Witcher" feeling should not equal to a lack of colour. The shadows on the board don't help, since they make around 20-30% of the screen darker (on NG boards the whole bottom row is under a shadow). Leaders look great, but the player's leader should maybe be moved a bit forward so that players don't look at the back of their heads most of the time (maybe to the dividing line between your two rows and turning them more to their side by default).
I will be giving more feedback regarding bugs, card design and balance after more testing. Best of luck in the next three weeks!
