Hello fellow Gwent players, 10.8 patch notes is out today, and I'm very happy that various problems I have with the current game are addressed. I think this is a great time to take a deeper look at the game mechanics, what I want to talk about today is Blue Coin Abuse.

Note that this discussion is NOT meta dependent but a pure discussion on the overall game design itself. Also, I am aware of the existence of red coin abuse, since that is already well-known, I'll be focusing on blue coin abuse in this post. (Yes both coins can be abusive, there are many decks and different cases in Gwent.)

Before we start, this is going to be a long post. And despite not liking to brag about my rank, I have been within the top 500 players in pro rank for many seasons (currently 222th), and I have been playing Gwent since beta. I'm stating this so that maybe more players will be interested in what I have to say, but still, feel free to share your thoughts and discuss in a civilized manner, thank you.

What is blue coin abuse?

Many know about the red coin abuse, but the advantage that being on blue coin gives is often overlooked. The most obvious advantage that it gives is that, if both players are willing to play to their last card in round one, blue coin players have the extra points given by the strategem to help contest round control. However, this point advantage is more like blue coin "advantage" instead of "abuse". To correctly state the term, I will say that blue coin abuse is "The huge advantage that strategem grants, which players cannot normally obtain".

For example, Griffin Witcher gaining veil from Crystal Skull, Urn of Shadow + Arachas Queen, or the most notorious Ciri: Dash + Crystal Skull. Note that by "cannot normally obtain" I'm not saying it's impossible to do, but you have to float the card on the board, unlike with strategem, you can do it without giving your opponent a chance to interact with. (Ex: Abaya + AQ is risky.)

Why is blue coin abuse bad for the game?

First of all, strategems cannot be interact with. Radovid's Royal Guards was a strong card because you either have to spend your removal on it, or you will have a difficult time removing the next card they play. However, having TA is basically having a much stronger Royal Guards with immunity, which can easily protect your units. The problem is that, many strong units are designed to be weak against removals, to balance their OP abilities. For example, nerfing King Foltest from 6 power to 5 power is huge, despite the OP ability is still there.

On the other hand, if one wants to protect King Foltest, they need setups. This directly lead to another problem:

Most protecting measures require setups, either it is Defender, Royal Guards or whatever unit with a protecting order ability. By doing setup, you are essentially trading your value for stability. Because the card you are protecting, which is likely be an engine, is now played at later turns. Moreover, your setup is interactable, even if it's the annoying Defender, it is interactable. But strategems don't require any setups, and it is uninteractable.

Imagine playing in a siege mirror, blue coin players can simply play their Reinforced Ballista and protect it immediately, which makes the red coin player immediately in a huge disadvantage in contesting the round.

Note that this is not a problem exclusively to TA and Crystal Skull, take a recent deck for example.

Tiger's Eye can immediately boost Bincy Blumerholdt by 5, making this very strong engine much harder to remove. Or maybe, they can trigger Treasure Huntress much earlier than they normally could, by reaching the hoard requirement much earlier.

Floating Mask of Uroboros forces your opponents to play their 4p engines later, otherwise you can snipe it with Coral directly. (See ya Saskia)

All of the above example are things that are strong, but also normally impossible. If you want to achieve the above "combo" without strategem, it is often that you have to float your strong engine on the board for at least one turn. (Imagine playing Radeyah to trigger Feign Death)

Secondly, it adds more randomness to players in round one (To see a full explanation of problem with randomness in R1 please see my previous post). This might be acceptable if you are playing in tournaments, in which you know which coin you are playing on before you select your deck, which is not the case on the ladder.

So why am I raising this up now?

The blue coin abuse has been an issue for a long time, but they were not as prevalent as today. Previously, many engines generate value by self-boosting, so if you protect it with TA, you are now vulnerable to tall punishes. But nowadays, many cards are generating value without boosting self, especially now that Infuse is a keyword, cards like Treasure Huntress can be really scary.

(TBH, the most annoying blue coin abuse in 10.7 is Treasure Huntress + Crystal Skull IMO, and I believe CDPR is ready to print out more possibly overpowered cards in the near future.)

What is the solution?

The solution that balance everything out, to me, is a single strategem with 5 power and immunity. However, this solution is boring because faction strategems are awesome.

So my proposed solution is that strategems can only be used if you have 7 cards or less in hand. By simply adding this restriction, players cannot simply spam any engine as their first card, Ciri: Dash can be answered much more easily, Coral cannot snipe your 4p unit as easy as always… Many problem caused by the blue coin abuse can be alleviated, while problems like Griffin Witchers, Arachas Queen are not fixed, and player can still protect their engines two turns later, the issue is at least, less severe.

This is the solution I came up with, and I do think it does not fix everything, so if you have a better solution, feel free to share with us.

Another potential solution is to give the red coin player a weaker strategem, for example, gain 3 coins, draw 1 discard 1 and only spawn 1 crow. With this solution, both player can now do something they normally can't. It's not great because now drawing key cards in round one becomes the new problem, but it's slightly more fair. (Ofc you have to buff blue player's strategem value if you are using this solution.)

Next Steps

As mentioned, I don't think the proposed solution fixed everything, but a step in the correct direction. I do still think Crystal Skull can still give a player huge advantage and Arachas/Sabbath might be problematic in the future (The cat might be gone now, but there will always be another scary monster).

I might propose to nerf Crystal skull to 3p, to balance out the engine value it is potentially providing. But the detail of balancing is out of the scope of this post, all I hope is that this post can raise awareness to the overlooked Blue Coin Abuse to CDPR. They are the one in charge, and responsible for coming up with the solution.

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If you are reading this, thank you for spending your time. I am not a native speaker of English, thus I'm still improving my writing. However, I am thinking about writing more articles like this in the future. If you like this and think it will be beneficial to the Gwent community, please let me know. If you think posts like this is quite useless, please also let me know, so you can help me decide whether it is worth spending my time in writing these articles, thanks.