One of skills in Gwent is building your deck ensuring some consistency, making yourself room for planned combos. It's one of factors that is making this game very competitive.
But how can you do that if your deck is topped with 5 bronzes? Basically, what you draw in first round, is what you will be playing with to the end of match. You are harassed with "gold" bronzes
Blightmaker, cost 5, playing for 11 points including 1 thinning and than
Witcher Mentor, cost 6 playing for 10-13, cause you never see or will see your Oneiro or Heatwave after being clogged with 2/3 point bronzes.
You spend all your resources eventaully loosing to some clearly OP bronzes in first round, your next 3 draws consist of 10 raw points of trash, just so you can be easily rushed with Kolgrim boosting 12 points each round, hidden behind Affan. Should you have any resources to deal with Affan, you will have none for Kolgrim.
I like the approach of this mechanic, but with current cards this is a problem. Kolgrim was fine before, but lack of resources that enemy is struggling with due to clogging, is what makes this card suuuuper powerful. Blightmaker and Witcher Mentor also need some balancing. Value and tempo they create without any combos or consecutive moves is just too enormous for 5 or 6 bronzes! What CDP thinking when designing such cards? I'd like to hear the answer to that question.
Because of Clogging, Gwent is back to lottery draws, and trust me CDP, you cannot draw with trash topping up your deck. I rarely win those games, but only if I am lucky, and honestly I'm already tired of it, seeing another netdecking noob exploiting this utterly ridicilous idea.
I really do not want to get back to the point when I'm tired of Gwent shortly after coming back, just becase CDP will not fix something quickly enough.
Nearly all issues I and others were talking about in the past were eventually touched/fixed/blanaced, but the problem was with the time it took. Remember SK Second Wind? How ridicilous that was? How long it took CDP to change it? Than there was Blood Eagle, Harald and more ridicilousness on SK side. These fixes eventually came in, but after weeks of suffering. After that Viy was added, community called it almost straight away, but CDP ignored it for like 2 months and then suddenly decided to nerf it. Those are simple simple changes and could be answered almost immediately.
I know I switched subjects half-way, but I wanted to use that opportunity to clearly state that CDP takes way too much time with hotfixes. While I do not dwelve on the past, I do not wish to suffer from badly balanced meta again.
I do not know if you guys agree, but I believe NG witchers are a problem with current expansion. When community said that NG bronzes are weak, we meant on buffing them, not making new OP cards. It's hard for me to see any logic behind it.
Thanks for reading