I dont understand one thing - why does it mean it is better player, why doesnt it mean that NG is overpowered?
Because NG currently has the weakest bronzes in the game, locks bricks against deploy abilities/ pointslam, poison can be worked around easily ( defender, veil, purify, forcing low point targets ), no points/requires a lot of setup.
NG has like 4-5 very good golds, can't deny that, but that's it.
What NR decks are you playing? Triple duel shieldwall? Revenant control? SK patricide fury? Lippy? MO OH? These are all brainded decks where it's just a matter of playing cards, often without even looking at the sequencing.
So yeah, if that person can work around your meta decks with NG at higher ranks props to him, good piloting skill ( or luck ).
In short: you having trouble beating NG definitely does not equal to NG being overpowered. Especially not while playing as a NR or SK player.
Sorry guys but all this sounds like BS. Just played as usual vs Nilfgaard, I get those like 8 out of 10. You keep telling me it doesnt mean anything, I keep telling you that is becuase they are OP and most of the players go for easy win. So they Poisoned 4 cards, destroyed one with destroy unit with status, locked and stole another and then renewed leaders abilty to lock another. It left me with 3 cards or so. Now please, I am seriously curious, if you beat NG like anytime you please, becuase that is how you make it sound, how exactly do you fight this.
unfortunately there's no good news here. NG lost double ball so quite a few of the players went to SK/NR, as is evident by the huge drop in play rates for NG and the increase in SK/NR. It's not that NG is bad it's still very strong but it's played less because it's no longer the "easiest" win, and that also means it's no longer encountered as much by some players. You will encounter NG players based on your deck (ppl here contest that but it's a far gone conclusion by numerous players). There are likely specific cards that you have auto included that is triggering matching algorithm. Change your deck and you'll encounter more of other factions. There's really no advice that hasn't already been shared to counter it besides another meta deck, that's just the state of the game presently.
I'd add that it has been the state of nearly every CCG at some point on competitive level, nothing strictly Gwent specific. I had my time in a couple more similar games (being a high-legend Hearthstone player myself for years before starting Gwent), and I can safely assure you that such binary states have been part of all these card games I've known.
First, and I believe this is the most important part to digest: you cannot and should not be able to competitively beat all sort of decks with your selection. This is normal, and should be the standard. You probably missed the party where SK dominated this meta for mulitple months after the previous expansion's release - and believe me, it was anyhting but fun. Or the days where there were significantly less options to fight NG poisons / Double Ball strategies (the latter never being the top-dog). Playing NR SW, you should face serious difficulties vs a Ball deck. Playing NR Revenants, not so much. The same goes for the classic SK warriors package - it should be a solid matchup vs NG, pretty even grounds.
To look at it from a different angle: the same NG poison deck suffers greatly vs a Fireswarm (non-devotion version) or a Lippy deck with zero tall units or important engines.
Yes, the matchmaking in these games most probably tracks your deck choice as well as your card choice to some extent, and depending on your winrate, will match you against opponents with a higher chance against you once your winrate goes over a certain threshold. Again, this is nothing new, the same happens in other CCGs as well. This serves the purpose to flatten the curve at some point, but keep in mind: it still depends on the player is he/she gets those wins, or not. Pro players are there where they are for a reason: dedication time investment, grinding and eradicating those minor(?) mistakes other players still make in order to improve those chances.
This again?
Okay, look, easy uncapped single-target removal spam can be either infuriating (like Double Ball was) or pretty bad, depending on the meta in question.
There's no point in nerfing/buffing such cards, because they're super context-sensitive, and would need yet another adjustment every now and then. Ultimately, stuff like poison or VVM is just poorly designed cards that can't be allowed to be consistently good in their current form.
But it's exceedingly clear now that this rework isn't happening, so just... either learn how to pilot Assimilation/Enslave properly or give up on the faction altogether, because there isn't a third option and probably won't be anytime soon, because CDPR really likes current dynamic of the game apparently.
Well, I mean...they did a good job in terms of GT support and created some really, really fun cards for this expansion, which I consider a sign of them TRYING, but the rest of the revealed cards kills all the hope for improvement. Which means they can't do good reworks, which means core control NG has to stay overnerfed, lest it becomes a plague upon the game once again.
Okay, look, easy uncapped single-target removal spam can be either infuriating (like Double Ball was) or pretty bad, depending on the meta in question.
There's no point in nerfing/buffing such cards, because they're super context-sensitive, and would need yet another adjustment every now and then. Ultimately, stuff like poison or VVM is just poorly designed cards that can't be allowed to be consistently good in their current form.
But it's exceedingly clear now that this rework isn't happening, so just... either learn how to pilot Assimilation/Enslave properly or give up on the faction altogether, because there isn't a third option and probably won't be anytime soon, because CDPR really likes current dynamic of the game apparently.
Well, I mean...they did a good job in terms of GT support and created some really, really fun cards for this expansion, which I consider a sign of them TRYING, but the rest of the revealed cards kills all the hope for improvement. Which means they can't do good reworks, which means core control NG has to stay overnerfed, lest it becomes a plague upon the game once again.
You still encounter Double Ball? Do you wanna... talk about it?
Just a question: when exactly was NG the plague upon the game? I'm talking in the context of SK that was almost 65% at pro at one time or NR and MO that consistently stayed around 55-60%. NG even at its peak was around 52%. It was never op. It was good but always (in the space of last three journeys at least) overshadowed by the likes of SK, NR, Harmony, Hidden Cache. Double Ball was overplayed in tournaments because it was best at abusing red coin at the time. It was also popular at lower ranks because people didn't know how to play against it, and you could have 50+% winrate guaranteed because of autowins on red coin. But in reality it was never even top 3 deck iirc. There were way bigger plagues upon the game.
I'm just saying such judgements that NG was a plague are very subjective, and it's not unreasonable to assume that it was them that caused the NG overnerfs. There was no other reason to nerf NG but the rants. What's more, those nerfs to NG core and Formation was one of the biggest balancing errors by CDPR. NG was not strong at the time, its power was already waning cuz of veil and power creep in other factions. And nerfing NG while releasing stuff like Shieldwall...? These nerfs caused the meta to become ultra binary with cards like Corruption, Rockslide, Geralt: Pro, Rivia and ofc Heatwave making their way to half the decks because greed did not have NG to balance it out anymore.
And the expansion reveals show how devs struggle designing this faction. NG cards are like 3 orders of magnitude weaker and more iffy then all the other factions (except SY maybe). Gwent will only become even more of what it is now: undiluted greed only balanced out by removal overload. AKA polarize your deck as much as humanly possible and then draw exactly the same amount of golds/removal as the opponent because if you draw one less then you (often) auto-lose.
By being an awful bully that punished having any good units at all. Engines? Punished. Big bodies? Punished. Average bodies with an order effect? Still punished. Even regular 5-strenghts duds were fair game.
All while putting out decent units with bodies.
You had to play either wide or unitless (still didn't guarantee the win!), the only other option was losing. I went with unitless and invented Dragon Dream Aglais thing, and had a lot of fun ultimately, but it was still a forced measure.
Know how playing against DB/SB felt? Much like it feels in SK Warriors matches right now. Pretty much the same thing, except with SK the damage is technically capped.
I am yet to see a more deckbuilding-restrictive archetype. And that's how it was a plague that shouldn't happen again.
Okay, now that's just sly. At one point some meta reports put SB (not DB, admittedly) into tier 2 territory, and let me remind you - tier 2 means "very nearly the best", and the t1 decks followed a similarly annoying formula, except a bit more on pointslam side (but still with generous amounts of strong removal).
But just because there were stronger decks, doesn't mean it wasn't awful for the game health. After all, not everyone wants to just spam t1 all day.
Most importatly, said t1's didn't impose as many deckbuilding restrictions. You could just...add a Geralt of your choosing, maybe a couple of purifies and do whatever you wanted from there on. The Ball was a different story.
Actually, rockslide/korathi stuff in every deck is more fair than a "kill everything" deck that didn't balance so much as outright prohibited several archetypes. Oh, and just as importantly, "balancing greed" this way only promotes more greed, as in "spam engines until something sticks".
Well, I mean, that's my whole point. Easy points are bad for the game, yet easy removal is even worse. They are careful with buffing NG as it could easily result in making a stale meta even worse than it already is. CDPR try to steer the game away from automatic engines and instant kill mechanics, apparently, but we aren't quite there yet... and while we aren't, buffing THE control faction is very, very dangerous.
Again, just look at the Warriors to see what I mean.
edit: if we had things my way, uncapped autopilot engines would be purged from the game and all the control cards would have to fulfill a decent condition to work (Corruption is an okay example), but it isn't happening soon, I'm afraid.
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If that'd been the case, Tactical would've had 80-90% winrate. As it happens, it hardly ever broke even beyond rank 16. This one quote illustrates of how legit NG rants are.
A false assumption. Just the fact Tactical is unitless doesn't mean it's broken in general. Besides, it, like, actually requires a brain to play, which tends to sag winrates across all levels. Don't give me "prorank" tirade again, please, prorank is full of people who got deck-carried there (and definitely was choke-full of the Ball [...] back then)
edit: also meta was ultra-saturated with wide decks which also is also something Tactical isn't especially good against. And the reason people flocked to swarms? The Ball again. Poison is bad, mkay?
edit 2: even if it hadn't been the case, the state of a single archetype doesn't say much about faction in general.
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You just said that unless you're swarm or unitless, you always lose to Double Ball. If that had been the case, Double Ball would have had 80-90% winrates. Obviously, that's never been the case. You use exaggeration and hyperbole to make your point. Which is fine in a conversation.
But the problem is devs evidently listen to such "arguments" because they did nerf NG for no (objective) reason. And now they are afraid to make even one solid card for NG.
But the problem is devs evidently listen to such "arguments" because they did nerf NG for no (objective) reason. And now they are afraid to make even one solid card for NG.
That's not how statistics works. Your exaggeration could only potentially be true in a world where only 10% decks played are unitless/wide. But it was actually the opposite - Double Ball, Harmony and Uprising, with some Passiflora thrown in. Note, that even with the rampant prevalence of these decks, that are specifically good against DB, it still had a decent winrate.
Despite existing in a meta, that is explicitly wide. Now, tell me, how is a tall-punish deck that fares okay against swarms isn't broken?
Yeah, 10-20% meta decks were swarms during the supposed "reign" of Double Ball. Unitless, that's not been a thing (in meta) since minimum unit count. Double Ball, Harmony and Passiflora are not swarm lists!
Anyway, this discussion makes no sense. NG is in the gutter and it seems devs want it to stay there. Or don't know how to get it out. Either way, it's most probably staying there. NG new cards are terribad, and I learned not to get my hopes up when Slama talks about love&buffs.
I wasn't joking. Gimme a single good NG reveal. I mean "good" as in "competitive" and "effectively able to contribute to high winrates across the meta." And before you say Ivar just think how many matchups will brick him and look at the other witcher masters.
Ivars seems to me one of the most overated cards of the expansion probably you will rarely get a value above 8-9 with him, that is not a great value for 10 provision card.
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Harmony went tall and wide and was overtuned enough to handle the poison most of the time, Passiflora engine overloaded hard as well and had a brutally inconvenient to deal with defender, and Double Ball mirror matches were decided by the coin or the draw. All of them spreaded value among too many targets for poison to matter, hence "swarm" designation (i'm aware true swarms go even wider, but these are wide enough to counter).
And...should I really point out what the term "unitless" means in the game with minimum unit counts?
"Low-unit", if you insist.
True
A severe overstatement. The fact it doesn't have a single OP archetype doesn't make it underpowered relative to other factions in general. It merely doesn't have an OP archetype to challenge a few overtuned and overspammed decks (except it kinda does, but people make up all kinds of excuses to prove Assimilate isn't competitive). If NG still underperforms when the current top dogs are nerfed into oblivion as per CDPR custom, this statement might become true.
Definitely not.
They're careful, true, and if you stop denying the obvious you'll see why.
I suspect the way you see it right now is that CDPR nerfed the easy uncapped removal spam because a bunch of rank 25 noobs complained at reddit. Which wasn't what happened. Nearly damn everyone hated it, not just noobs. Heck, several pro-rank youtube personalities expressed their disgust openly (some still do, occasionally).
Even trying to defend Ball typically boiled down to grasping at technicalities, pointing fingers, making nonsense comparisons, poorly-disguised suggestions to git good and interpreting winrates as the direct proofs of power/lack thereof utterly ignoring the meta-context.
Except they're trying. Please keep in mind that WotW meta is going to be a very different place after all the nerfs and changes. You can't possibly infer how well or poorly NG will fare just by looking at the new cards - in part, because their full interactive effect isn't immediately clear, and in part because yes, we'll also probably receive some nerfs and changes with the patch, which muddles things even more.
And that's going to be the end of that personal skirmish. One post deleted for going way too far.