I've been a longtime player of Gwent since Kill the Servers pre Closed beta, and have always hoped it would go back to the popularity of Open Beta. I believed it would always come back, but after looking at some statistics I believe the game is in decline or at least not getting more popular. It is worrying that a game can peak in Early Beta at 100 times its current popularity, at this time there are only 240 viewers on Twitch(Not even enough to sustain 1 fulltime streamer).
The game I believe is stale and would require major changes to fix it. I hate to say this but I believe this is due to the removal of 3 rows for 2 rows so it would fit on mobile platforms, and the changing of the ranged, siege, and melee row requirements. When you drafted a deck, you used to have to make sure you had a good balance of melee, ranged and siege units to counter row punish and weather. Interesting game mechanics like clearing weather are removed for little reason.
The game is also moving from interesting decks and playstyles, to a unsatisfying scissors, paper, rock of engines versus control with nowhere near the strategy and unique mechanics that it used to have. Interesting cards like Handboost with Quen Sign and interactions such as Kambi, Unitless Artifacts are removed from the game or unit caps are added which make unique decks no longer to exist. Players complain about archetypes like Greatswords and Axemen, which they cannot deal with properly and the archetypes are removed or heavily nerfed so they cannot be competitive.
A lot of cards also exist in your deck for the immediate value they can provide for their provision count. Patience is a good example of something different to the game, but many cards have become an immediate pointslam of what it is worth straight away on the board rather than synergy or combination play.
With Gwent announcing they would rethink their developer team size I think they need to reevaluate where this game is going. I think a lot of players knew it was happening already with the slow drip release of cards from Price of Power and no more Holiday events like Mahakam Festival and new monthly trees.
In summation, I believe to save Gwent from obscurity, we need to look at the past and why it was so popular to begin with in Closed and Public Beta. I still want to play Gwent in the future, if I find it has changed for the better, but I would not introduce friends to the game in this current state.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/gwent/comments/r5i6dy/gwent_needs_to_go_back_to_its_roots/
