4Game

​

NG Usurper Evolving Leader Card

In this patch, devotion has been given a slight buff through various tweaks to the evolving leader cards. My early view is that despite these buffs, these leader cards will remain power-crept based on the 2022 game-state. My opinion isn't based on stat lines, provision cost or devotion payoffs. Instead, I'm thinking about how these cards perform in the current version of Gwent where Round 1 and R2 have become so much more important.

These cards firstly are designed to realise their full potential in R3 through their evolving nature, which means their bad cards to have in R1 because you simply are not playing them, which can lead to a potential risky mulligan especially if you're in a situation where you believe your opponent will be smorc'ing (pushing unreasonably hard) in R1.

So I wanted to discuss the viable methods of improving these cards (beyond individual card traits) to make these worth their high provision costs and actually useful across all 3 rounds.The simplest/ most obvious idea is to remove the first (garbage) state, so each of these cards starts the game on their phase 2 state, with only a single evolution which occurs in R2 if the devotion condition is met. This now makes these far more helpful to both the decks which they theoretically synergise with in addition to providing a bit more juice for devotion decks which currently lack in many ways compared to their non-devo counterparts.

So in summary this becomes a card which can be played in every round, but you'd get full value from R2 onwards.

Any thought? Good, bad, or won't make much of a difference?