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Gwent: The Witcher Card game - standalone Gwent game - now with Rogue Mage standalone expansion

Joined
Jan 7, 2017
Messages
1,370
So, how does this game compare to Hearthstone?

And it follows a similar payment model right, free to play and craft/win cards but can purchase more cards with monies?
The game is more strategic and consistent than HS. Each turn you play only one card and you have to be more attentive to your combos and win conditions. You draw 10 when starting, 2 more on the second round and another on the third, plus what yo can get from card effects. Bluffing and baiting is a must, and knowing the meta helps a lot.

Regarding card packs, Gwent also has the in-game money/real money thing going on. If you want to go full F2P, you can easily get 1 pack a day (2 once or twice a week due to accumulation of GGs and minor rewards) by winning 6 rounds (you don't have to win the whole match to make it count). If you want to spend more time, winning 18 rounds will net you 2 packs a day, plus the extra odd pack every few days due to the aforementioned minor rewards.
 

Andhaira

Arcane
Joined
Nov 25, 2007
Messages
1,868,966
So, how does this game compare to Hearthstone?

And it follows a similar payment model right, free to play and craft/win cards but can purchase more cards with monies?
The game is more strategic and consistent than HS. Each turn you play only one card and you have to be more attentive to your combos and win conditions. You draw 10 when starting, 2 more on the second round and another on the third, plus what yo can get from card effects. Bluffing and baiting is a must, and knowing the meta helps a lot.

Regarding card packs, Gwent also has the in-game money/real money thing going on. If you want to go full F2P, you can easily get 1 pack a day (2 once or twice a week due to accumulation of GGs and minor rewards) by winning 6 rounds (you don't have to win the whole match to make it count). If you want to spend more time, winning 18 rounds will net you 2 packs a day, plus the extra odd pack every few days due to the aforementioned minor rewards.

Is it out of Beta yet?

Also, is it possible to play mostly spell decks, or is it more about mass units?

And what incentive is there to spend real money, to mass buy packs? Does someone with money and more cards have advantage (aka pay to win)?
 
Joined
Jan 7, 2017
Messages
1,370
Is it out of Beta yet?

Also, is it possible to play mostly spell decks, or is it more about mass units?

And what incentive is there to spend real money, to mass buy packs? Does someone with money and more cards have advantage (aka pay to win)?

It's in open beta.

There are a couple of spell decks, but mostly it's units with a varying element of control.

If you buy cards, you get more cards faster, which will enable you to make better decks sooner and climb in ranked, same as in any other online CCG. I think, however, that full F2P is feasible because grinding the daily quest is much more profitable

Starting decks are decent but you will want to tweak them sooner than later.
 

odrzut

Arcane
Joined
Apr 30, 2011
Messages
1,082
Location
Poland
F2P is definitely viable, I'm doing it and I have almost all the monster faction cards and another 3 legendaries and several epics in scraps. Well, closed beta rewards and cards milling for full value after nerfs kinda helped, but still - you can have tier 1 deck after 2 weeks to month even now. The best thing is - even with vastly inferior deck you will most often win 1 round out of 3, and 6 such 1-2 loses a day give you a card pack just like 3 victories.

Also you choose the highest value card in pack out of 3 options so there's less duplicates than in hearthstone.

There are a few very silly spell decks, like Scoia Tael spell deck, where you only play immune units and removal spells for the first 2 rounds, and in round 3 put your only nonimmune units on the field, that got buffed to like 17-20 str each by all that spells in the meantime. But it's counterable (just keep debuffs for the last round).

The problems now:
- Skellige with axeman and weather seems OP (but not as much OP as just after the patch - meta shifted a little towards monsters recently).
- lots of bugs (mostly visual, but some will cost you victory)
- clunky ui
 

Cowboy Moment

Arcane
Joined
Feb 8, 2011
Messages
4,407
Andhaira Main difference is that Gwent doesn't have a draft mode currently. As a new F2P player in HS, you pretty much have to play arena exclusively, as you can't even build a cheap aggro deck from what you get to start with. In Gwent, there's only constructed - either Casual or Ranked. Gwent has fairly rigid deck building rules for constructed - basically every deck wants to play the maximum of 4 Golds and 6 Silvers (Legendaries and Epics in HS terms), so there aren't any newbie-friendly aggro decks that don't even want to run any high-cost cards, as there usually are in HS.

On the other hand, Gwent is much more generous with its rewards. You are gifted a lot of stuff to start with, daily rewards are much better, and there are some very substantial rewards for progressing in Ranked (think like 5 packs for every 3 ranks on the HS ladder). There are some strong decks that don't rely much on their Gold cards, and can be run with starter replacements, and if you're feeling adventurous, you can dust like two factions worth of starter cards and craft a T1 deck pretty much out of the gate.

Ultimately, if you enjoy ranked, the game is quite F2P friendly. If you don't, there's really no reason to play imo.

It can't be stressed enough how bad the UI is, specially the deck building.

Eh, the deckbuilding is kinda irrelevant, you spend very little time on that screen anyway. Now, the fucking consolized UI for mulliganing and picking targets, on the other hand, is truly dreadful.
 

Zer0wing

Cipher
Joined
Mar 22, 2017
Messages
2,607
Didn't know there's a dedicated Gwent thread.
So, I'm currently sitting on 10000 scraps since the last patch and kinda out of loop, which cards are now the best bet to craft?
 

odrzut

Arcane
Joined
Apr 30, 2011
Messages
1,082
Location
Poland
Skellige with axeman, savage bear, shield maiden, Kambi, Hjalmar, Renew, and some weather to feed axeman is OP right now. But people started teching against that, and there will probably be a nerf next week.

In general Renew is very good because it allows you to resurect not only your but also enemy gold cards. It's bullshit honestly.
 

Cadmus

Arcane
Joined
Dec 28, 2013
Messages
4,264
Didn't know there's a dedicated Gwent thread.
So, I'm currently sitting on 10000 scraps since the last patch and kinda out of loop, which cards are now the best bet to craft?
I've been watching Leddit completely shit themselves following every single patch so I'm not sure any cards will stay too relevant too long but I guess you can always mill them after they get nerfed.
 

Zer0wing

Cipher
Joined
Mar 22, 2017
Messages
2,607
...Long live Axemen. There's pleny of ways to do mass damage on the opponent's board.
 
Joined
Jan 7, 2017
Messages
1,370
I find their claim that these changes are intended to help new players somewhat hilarious, since they have neutered the best starter deck (Eredin/Wild hunt). This time around it seems like there's little method to the madness. There are a bunch of whiners complaining that Skellige got nerfed just because frost was nerfed and the bears now work the correct way.

IMHO, they should just choose one stack resolution queue and stick with it, instead of tweaking it for individual cards, because there are hidden inconsistencies and that sucks on a game with rules.

Sent from my SM-A500FU using Tapatalk
 

Seari

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Nov 25, 2014
Messages
849
Pathfinder: Wrath
This game will be incredibly boring without weather, might as well stop playing.
 

Zer0wing

Cipher
Joined
Mar 22, 2017
Messages
2,607
Axemen are nerfed as fuck. They aint coming back.
I don't even think Axemen are the problem to begin with. Gwent's gameplay demands more cards, different cards. Scoia and Nilfs felt like two parts of a bigger faction.
 

v1rus

Arcane
Joined
Jul 14, 2008
Messages
2,253
I keep repeating this mantra -

Without weather in every deck, there are going to be less weather counters. Without weather counters, the decks that actually use weather are going to get way more value out of it.

Lets hope it works out that way.
 

Cowboy Moment

Arcane
Joined
Feb 8, 2011
Messages
4,407
New weather will, for the most part, deal the same amount of damage as old weather in a lot of cases, with the exception of Frost getting insane value on stacked rows. What's unfortunate is that it has become almost completely brainless for either player. Current Fog and Rain are interactive and encourage both players to think about ways to maximize or minimize their value, and Frost, at the very least, discourages row stacking. Perhaps there wasn't really a need for weather to excessively punish lined-up minions in a row, in a game where there already exist many other cards that do so, but it would still be nice for weather to be somewhat counterable without outright clearing it. The upcoming patch makes it about as boring as possible.

It feels like this is a temporary band-aid before a proper rework, same as with Gold interaction and the Kambi and Borkh changes. I, for one, am looking forward to no more games largely decided by the amount of weather clears in both players' hands.
 

SmartCheetah

Arcane
Joined
May 7, 2013
Messages
1,076
I think my Nauzicaa standard bearer will keep his place in my Nilfgaard decks despite the weather changes. All in all, people might still keep using them to some extent.
 

sser

Arcane
Developer
Joined
Mar 10, 2011
Messages
1,866,662
New weather will, for the most part, deal the same amount of damage as old weather in a lot of cases, with the exception of Frost getting insane value on stacked rows. What's unfortunate is that it has become almost completely brainless for either player. Current Fog and Rain are interactive and encourage both players to think about ways to maximize or minimize their value, and Frost, at the very least, discourages row stacking. Perhaps there wasn't really a need for weather to excessively punish lined-up minions in a row, in a game where there already exist many other cards that do so, but it would still be nice for weather to be somewhat counterable without outright clearing it. The upcoming patch makes it about as boring as possible.

It feels like this is a temporary band-aid before a proper rework, same as with Gold interaction and the Kambi and Borkh changes. I, for one, am looking forward to no more games largely decided by the amount of weather clears in both players' hands.

They shouldn't do wide, cross-synergy changes to begin with. I like that they do make an effort to balance, but they do it with such a huge net that it just clutters everything up.
 

Cowboy Moment

Arcane
Joined
Feb 8, 2011
Messages
4,407
New weather will, for the most part, deal the same amount of damage as old weather in a lot of cases, with the exception of Frost getting insane value on stacked rows. What's unfortunate is that it has become almost completely brainless for either player. Current Fog and Rain are interactive and encourage both players to think about ways to maximize or minimize their value, and Frost, at the very least, discourages row stacking. Perhaps there wasn't really a need for weather to excessively punish lined-up minions in a row, in a game where there already exist many other cards that do so, but it would still be nice for weather to be somewhat counterable without outright clearing it. The upcoming patch makes it about as boring as possible.

It feels like this is a temporary band-aid before a proper rework, same as with Gold interaction and the Kambi and Borkh changes. I, for one, am looking forward to no more games largely decided by the amount of weather clears in both players' hands.

They shouldn't do wide, cross-synergy changes to begin with. I like that they do make an effort to balance, but they do it with such a huge net that it just clutters everything up.

I don't think these are primarily balance changes. They're not interested in fine-tuning the balance of the current meta, but rather in reworking even core mechanics until the game is in a state they perceive as healthy. Weather was apparently way too ubiquitous for their taste, and I can't say I disagree, for example.

Now, some of their specific change are just kind of dumb (Trebuchet buff rofl, hope you enjoy your Kaedweni Sergeant meta), but I don't mind the reworks in principle. What I dislike are knee-jerk over-nerfs, which is what happened to NG, and thankfully SK avoided them this time.
 

Grubba

Arcane
Joined
Jan 10, 2012
Messages
992
Anyone else getting a little turned off by these big sweeping changes that have happened with the last two patches? I played the shit out of this game in closed beta, around 150 hours or so, and continued to do so after the start of open beta but my interest has fallen off a cliff in recent weeks. Ya, I get that it's still early in the open beta and the game is far from finished but I'm getting tired of having to relearn so many things every couple of weeks.

Now sitting on 25k+ worth of scraps after today's round of full-value milling.
 

Cowboy Moment

Arcane
Joined
Feb 8, 2011
Messages
4,407
Well, for now I'm enjoying myself much more than before patch, though the novelty might wear off, currently meeting a lot of Monsters, mostly Consume, but a surprising amount of Weather as well. I've seen quite a bit of the mass Foglet deck with Necker Warriors, which makes a lot of sense - that deck's primary weakness was always being shit if the opponent can clear all the fog, which is way less likely now. There was also a bunch of ST, some Reveal NG, but basically no NR. Guess all the surprise nerfs turned people off the faction.

In any case, I've played Tempo NG to Rank 18, opened 3 Golds from my 7 Kegs, and am happy for now.
 

SmartCheetah

Arcane
Joined
May 7, 2013
Messages
1,076
I'm a Nilfgaard bitch, because I'm fokkin in love with Nilfgaard. I'm still in fond of John Calveit and my win-ratio(post-patch) is like 80%
If I'm losing - it's mostly to consume monsters or dwarfatelle (or whatever they call it this time) - plus I lost once to the freaking NR (Reddit said that they would be OP, but they ain't)
Skellige must be a fucking shit now or people are scared as fuck. I havent played them once after the patch went online.

Cowboy Moment You cunt. 3 golds from 7 kegs? In my case it was like ~100 kegs before I had 1 shitty gold choice. RNG fucking sucks.
 
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