I think artifacts cost is find, what we need is more counter, cards with double option 1 remove artifact 2 another thing in case your opponent doesn't play anyone
Also, like someone mentioned above, artifacts need 1 adyacent unit to be played, that will solve a lot of the problem now. Which I think is the decks which are creature less and are full of artifacts. If you now need units to play them then you can EXPLOIT games like right now.
Have to say that artifacts (spear and shield) are useless at 7, they were in some cases useless at 5...
No it's not, Spear and shield can sometimes generate 1O points in a round, considering the situations when it will produce less it's perfectly balanced now.
Also, spear and shield sometimes not worth 5 provisions? Are you sure we're talking about the same game?
To be honest I'm not a huge fan of balancing a game by throwing hate cards willy nilly, no offense but it's a very dumb way of fixing issues since it doesn't solve the problem at its core and force people to play said hate cards.
It's bad for two reasons, 1/ It makes deck building less interesting because you have THAT type of card you need to put many copy of in all of your decks. I don't mind having to put 1 artifact removal in my decks but 2+ is just not how it should be. It's not how you make an interesting game. 2/ It reduces the power of lesser artifacts significantly and make them unplayable. Because you don't fix OP artifacts but just give more tools to fight them, artifacts that are perfectly fine in term of balance will massively suffer from a meta full of anti artifact cards. I personaly don't see the point of making cards unplayable, the dream for a CCG player is a game where all the cards are playable and balanced to an extend. It creates a more varied and interesting envirronement.
CDPR are right to move the provision costs in order to balance the cards, it reduces the options for someone who want to play a powerful card without changing said card but it's true that they can't solve everything this way, they'll have to rework some cards at some point, it's unevitable (Witcher trio, Sihil...).
They also have to realize that artifacts being difficult to remove should be an attribute to take into account for the pricing of those cards. The way they're balancing them right now is similar to units, if the card generate X power it costs X provisions but it's not the right way of doing it.
Each artifact should be slightly overcosted to outweight the fact that they're more difficult to remove. This is why it's always more benificial to play an artifact over a unit that "does the same thing" in the current state of the game. The fact that they have zeal counter balance the lack of body but nothing outweight their resiliency at the moment.