The Problems with Gwent

[Atomontage]

1. Ruined dynamic between opposing cards
2. Broken cards and abilities
3. Lack of sophisticated abilities on the cards

Lack of sophisticated abilities on the cards:

Of course, sophisticated and cool abilities are important in making gaming experience fun and providing players with puzzles to solve and decisions to make, which in turn makes the game skill based.

But that is not all there is to it...

See, in the traditional card games we all know, "removal" cards are very different: some destroy units with 3 strength or less, some with 5 or more, some destroy only specific type or "tribe" of units, some have a requirement from your side of the board. In Gwent though, every card simply deals "x" damage and destroys any unit, and this is where the problem began... I will refer to this as "simplicity".

Dynamic between "engine" cards and "removal" cards:

In Gwent resources are very limited. You can play only 1 copy of a golden card (which would be horrible even in a game like MtG). But not only that, your starting hand is the size of 10 and you only draw 6 cards through entire game. I will refer to this as "environment".
None of this is considered by developers, so the "removal" heavily overwhelms "engines".

• If we look at the sheer numbers, the amount of "removal" cards is simply staggering, there are also no restrictions on how many "removal" cards you can put in a deck, then there is the "environment" and plus the "simplicity". 4 of these things create a situation where you have to play a deck full of "engine" cards or have no "engine" cards at all, because you can expect any "engine" card you play (because of "simplicity") any amount of times (because of abundance of "removal" cards and no deck restrictions) to be removed and for you to lose 10% percent of your resources (because of "environment", 10% is 1/10 of a maximum hand size), meaning you are better off playing cards which give you immediate and higher value, unless you can match the amount of removal.
• While numbers are important, there is another thing a lot of people miss. Some decks revolve or could in theory revolve around a gold "engine" card. And because your ability to play gold cards is limited to 1 copy per card, the value resting on the shoulders of gold "engine" cards is extremely immense. Because of this "removal" cards achieve even greater value when removing a gold "engine" card -- something which might not be obvious on the surface.

Broken cards and abilities:

Let's get to the simple stuff.

• Poison is OP. It let's you remove any card as long as you can target it, it's way too versatile and universally good. The cards which provide poison are very cheap and due to nature of how poison works -- universal. 2 bronze cards of 4 provision cost should not be able to remove 100 strength card. Even worse, uncircumstantially and without any skill requirement. Another problem poison has is the fact that due to things mentioned above poison cards see a lot more play than the cards which are supposed to counter them. Purify and veil have very limited use, and the cards which provide them are very bad in all categories. So once again the balance of another dynamic is ruined.
• Geralt: Yrden is a great example of a horrible card. The effect is simply ridiculous, card has no counter-play and requires no skill to achieve the fullest extent of it's ability (which is only one). You can't call a card fair simply because it has a deck cost and chance of not working. Just like giving player the ability to equip wallhack and aimbot, but with a downside of halving player's health and equipment having the 50% chance of not being applied at the start of every game, is not fair. Design of every card should be striving to make the card fair (among other things) in every game, not only 50%, while other 50% of players can suffer. Additional 2 problems are the fact that the game has only 2 rows in the fist place, which makes it very difficult to play around the card, and the fact that a player has access to only 1 defender card and the staggering amount of "removal" cards push players towards placing all of their cards in 1 row. Another example of ruined balance of the dynamic.

Solutions:

• Make sophisticated and cool abilities.
• Make "removal" situational and require skill to play. Consider making some "removal" being unable to target gold cards.
• Make the amount of "engines" equal to or slightly higher than the amount of "removal" for the average game by introducing serious cost for running heavy "removal" (and "engine") decks, which would make it worth to choose such rout but only if you know what you are doing. Make it creative.
• Rework poison.
• Rework Geralt: Yrden.

 

[Afxs]

Geralt: Yrden? Really?
In my experience that card is played very rarely and I cant remember the last time I lost a game against that.

The more sophisticated and "cool" abilities in this game historically tend to be either borderline overpowered or pretty weak.
Of course it would be great to have more of them but it's a double-edged sword.

I think you're right about removal being generic, but I dont know what kind of restrictions would make sense. Everything I can think of would make the effectiveness of removal extremely matchup dependant. And that would make the game worse imo.
Gold cards being untargetable was a thing a few years ago but it would create a huge balancing problem if it would be reintroduced now.

About the cost for removal/engine Decks: Most top Tier Decks have a mix of both.
And if you invent some kind of provision toll, you have to make it different for every faction. But I dont see the need for anything like that.

 

[BlackSwan1092]

I would have to disagree with your post @Atomontage.

Though I hate when my engines are taken out or my set up plan keeps getting interrupted, I also hate when I am not running a control deck or any removals and my opponent plays an engine (bronze or gold) that boosts up to over 20 pts. Experienced players know which cards can be dangerous if let unchecked, so they take them out. My Dunca gets taken out 8/10 times, hell people have even heatwaved her lol because they know how devastating round 3 can be with the cards in hand boosted.

This is where you have to learn how to "bait" the removals. In my SK deck, I'll throw out Greatsword, and he's insta removed. Doesn't bother me, cause I don't need him to win the round, but now I just made my opponent waste a removal so I can better protect Harald another card in round 3. I throw out frigate with NR for the same reason.

Only one of each gold card is enough. Can you imagine how broken the game will be if we can have two of each golds?! (two defenders, two evolving cards, two heatwaves, etc..) If we were to implement silver cards to replace SOME of the lower tier golds (like the runestones one), sure. But golds, no.

I do no believe poison is op. It requires set up and can be countered. Sometimes, you will not have the answer to it, but that is part of the game. You will not have an answer for every match up. You have to adapt on the fly. Geralt Yrden, you can play around it by not row stacking. If you row stack, expect it to happen. You also have to consider the provision cost someone has to use for Geralt: Yrden, which can brick a lot.