Overall, I'm dissapointed. Last month, I played a lot of Gwent. That said, I barely touched classic; only playing that mode if it was part of a reward quest. Seasonal mode was actually fun for once without being easily solved by a meta-deck or a mechanic that the warped ruleset overly favoured. It helped too that MTGA had a rather bad meta, with wall-to-wall Golos/Field of the Dead in all modes that allowed it. For most of Season of the Cat, I was able to play without getting too tilted by Gwent's issues, some of which are part of its DNA, and others that are really down to the design team taking the easy route to pump out an expansion.
In the DNA department, we have immunity that renders cards uninteractable. Defenders have just taken that mechanic to the extreme. Thinking back to Beta days, immunity was always a problem that seemed to lead to a board wipe for the person not able to protect his cards from removal mechanics. So we've moved away from triple-scorch and janky Kambi-combos to a game of engines that either ping or boost played in any combination on an immune row. This denies effecient use of targetted removal, something that's very bad design in a game that has a fixed hand size, small deck and restricts number of copies to one or two of a card. The size restriction forces more strategic use of limited resources as it is, without having to dedicate 2 cards to kill one defender, since they either have armour, or enter out of removal range. Again, we have the old Gwent issue of heavily investing in tech losing overall point value in the deck.
The other DNA issue is of course leader abilities. Outside of Axemen and Greatswords, I can't think of any other oppressive decks that their wincon was some combo involving their leader ability. And always it's either been a card advantage combo or a point slam one. Anything else just doesn't consistently translate to an endstate with more points on the board than your opponent.
Recently, we have seen Mystic Echo's interaction with Novigradian Justice as one such example of one card being able to play two cards to give card and point advantage with tempo. It's sad to see that, despite how unpopular a similar interaction between Brouver+Cleaver/Dwarven Mercenary from the midwinter era was, CDPR don't seem to have taken the lesson to heart. Repacking a busted interaction doesn't balance it. Even changing the problem card is only addressing half the problem. The other half will always be the impact leader ability should have on the design space. It troubles me to see that something as obvious as a special card that tutors and clones any bronze dwarf and can be replayed by a leader in a faction that dwarves are native to isn't flagged for review before it leaves the drawing board.
And with that, we get to the easy route. Probably the most disapointing thing for me has been the realization that the design team have distilled the factions down to a few descriptive keywords and seem to use that to frame card design. This, to me at least, has made faction archetypes seem more homogenised, since many of the new cards just repeat abilities other faction cards already have. To use a car analogy, it's a bit like looking at an Opel Insignia and a Buick Regal - same thing, just with a different badge on the grill. So to for the cards - different art and text, but very similar abilities. And that is to the detriment of other archetypes, since they lose their unique abilities or don't get more specific cards to support them.
Yes, I get that, for CDPR, keeping it simple is more likely to keep them on track. After all, anyone that remembers Thronebreaker's long development can attest to the fact that when CDPR allow themselves to go beyond simple, it leads to long delays and an entirely different product than a simple expansion pack for the basic game. However, Gwent is a game that's full of unfinished archtypes. So rather than pumping out more-of-the-same card types that encapsulate faction keyword descriptives (e.g. NG - enslave, absorb, assimilate), maybe review the archetypes, settle on a few and make support cards that support them without being a spare engine or copy of a key bronze ability. This could even begin to bridge the high tradeoff in points for tech with decent utility body cards that could use the row mechanic to have dual tech effects built into them.
