Bounty is still lame.

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As the title says, bounty is closer to a meme strategy than to an actual competitive one.
Bounty has 3 key issues:

1) The lack of better "Fee" units.
2) The absolute lack of a proper leader ability.
3) Veil kills this strategy.

Let's talk about the first, fee units. We currently have 4 fee based damaging units that are worth talking about (we have more but most of them are trash), and those are:

  • Bronze Executioners
  • Freakshow
  • Scoundrel
  • Tunnel Drill

You may think that those would be enough to carry the deck, surprisingly they are not. Let's talk about the issues of those:

  • The bronze executioners are 3 power units that are extremely prompt to be insta killed, they never last for more than one turn, it is an specially bad deal considering, it is a 5 provision unit that only gives you 5 points by itself (3 power + 2 coins), this used to be a fair provision cost waaaaay back when it was introduced, but since then it has been absolutely power creeped, now a 5 x 5 deal is not a good deal anymore, either you make his profit bigger or increase his base power or give him some armor because for 5 provs. executioner just don't make the cut, or just reduce the cost to 4.
    Sadly, the deck relies too much on these outdated units.

  • Freakshow is a fair deal actually, it is usually an insta removal target but you would expect that from this good engine.

  • Scoundrel is the most expensive unit that damages on a fee, it is actually a great unit but as you would expect it gets Heat waved almost Immediately due to his high power nature it actually makes for an amazing heatwave target, but then again, you would expect that from a gold unit.

  • Tunnel Drill's nerf actually made it possible to run it inside a pure witch hunter deck, the issue now is that… It sucks.
    A 5 base power unit that has the potential to deal tons of damage is something the opponent is going to get rid as soon as possible, meaning you won't be able to make use of.

I believe the main issue lies on the lack of proper bronze units to deal damage, as you see, the Executioners have issues everywhere and are not a reliable damaging engine.

Maybe buff the Executioners, rework some outdated bronzes such as the Arena Scorpion (or whatever is called) or release new useful bronzes for Bounty. (The new SY bonded unit was a complete disappointment)

And the 2nd problem, which I believe is the greatest of the two.
The lack of a proper leader ability to go with Bounty.

Today bounty has to rely on leaders that don't have any kind of synergy with bounty or damaging, except that one that deals 8 damage which is a bad ability.
Bounty needs a leader that either:

  • Allows easy access to the bounty tag, meaning something that allows you to give an unit the Bounty status after "x" conditions are met or "x" turns.

  • Something that helps to do the killing more reliably. Maybe something like the leader that spawns 2 Jackals, you could have a leader that spawns Executioners or deals some kind of damage on a fee.

  • Give them a way to spend the money. When your deck is not struggling with bounties and damage output, you are actually struggling with "what the hell am I going to do with all this money?", the ability that spawns Jackals gives the money a purpose but it would be better to have something that damages instead of boosting.

And finally the 3rd issue being Veil.

  • Is it that hard to have an unit that both purifies and give bounty at the same time? Or at least a Witch Hunter that consistently purifies veils?

The deck is good at placing the bounties, but struggles at killing the units and a veil completely kills this deck.

I'm kinda disappointed at CDPR for only releasing new cards while completely forgetting about the older ones. The New Witch Hunter cards are amazing! But does it really matters if all of the older units are lame?
(Would you ever use Tamara? That is a goddamn NR unit inside bounty, wtf?!)

The design philosophy of CDPR in Gwent is… Sad.

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/gwent/comments/q3axi8/bounty_is_still_lame/

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