Did I come back to this game at the wrong time?

I have been playing Gwent since Open Beta and I love it to death. I have been playing continuously till almost 2 years ago when Way of the Witcher came out and I took a break due to wanting to focus on my studies. But last week, nostalgia and wanting to scratch the Gwent itch lead me to reinstall the game and start playing again.

For the first couple of matches I got absolutely destroyed, which is totally expected. I'm super rusty after all. I crafted a few of the new cards and tried again. Still lost. The problem was *no game ever went into round 3*. I have not seen this before in Gwent. Every round is a pointslam. No one is reserving their cards anymore especially since with cards like Aerondight and Gold Nekker, there is no incentive to play slow or play any engines at all. This is giving me PTSD of the old Dworf/Ciri Nova. Generally the OP cards are tied to a deck restriction mechanic which gives it an extremely binary and uncreative deck building. This has always been a shit mechanic IMO. Everytime they make a card with this mechanic, it leads to the most boring and broken meta (see old Ciri Nova). Hope they fix it soon. Until then I'll be playing Draft mode.