Nerf Sir Scratch-a-lot for the sake of a healthier game

I know MO players hate to hear that and will argue tooth and nail (no pun intended) against it, but hear me out. I played a match today vs. a MO Kitty player that highlighted so much of why this card is bad for the game.

The match lasted all of four turns. MO player opens with Decree into Kitty (naturally). Plays Defender on his second turn, which I promptly Heatwave. Third turn, he plays AQ to put Kitty in the graveyard and spends an OH leader charge to put a second Kitty on the board, which I promptly removed. Fourth turn, MO player plays Witch’s Sabbath, thinking he’ll get his two Kitties and AQ back so he can finally start messing up my sh!t. I had nothing in my graveyard at that point, however, so of course WS does diddly squat. At this point—clearly pissed that his one broken combo was falling flat—MO player forfeits and leaves. Probably would’ve quit on turn five anyway, because I was about to play Xavier Lemmens to clear out his Kitties for good.

What does this match say about the meta?

One: Broken cards attract bad players into the game.

I know one shouldn’t make assumptions, but it was so clear in this case. I checked out Mr. Kitty’s profile after the match and it was exactly what you’d expect. Newer player. Clearly not a MO main (nor any other faction), but had bounced all over the map. Maybe he’s an eclectic, you say—but no. He was 100 matches in on this season, all of them MO—almost surely all the same deck. And yet he clearly didn’t understand how his cards work (else he wouldn’t have made a boneheaded mistake) and had no skill or interest in trying to pilot his deck unless he was allowed to cram his one broken netdecked combo through.

Gwent should be a welcoming place, but this kind of player isn’t here to level up his skills, give back to the community, or even show good sportsmanship. This kind of player shows up just to abuse whatever is broken at the time and rack up cheap wins.

You might say, who cares, doesn’t hurt me, right? Well for one, these players make ladder a miserable, monotonous experience for everyone else. Two, when the devs run the numbers and see a ton of players abusing a particular deck over and over, they’re likely to come down with harsher nerfs to fix it. Kitty gets nerfed into the ground, never to be seen again.

Two: Broken cards mean constrained deck building, binary matches, and less diversity in the meta.

I go into the deck builder right now and see so many cool, fun cards I’d like to run but simply can’t, because every deck right now has to include purify, banish, graveyard hate, and other tech answers—stuff that has no particular synergy or is fun to play, but if they’re not in your deck, you just lose when you face Kitty, period.

And of course you have to draw exactly the right cards (the tech or tutors for them) in R1 to stand a chance. So a match vs. Kitty is not about skill, it’s entirely about luck—which is totally contrary to the point of the game’s design. Get an unlucky draw and any no-skill jobber can clean your clock.

And funny thing is, despite all the Renfri hate, Kitty seems to be pushing Renfri out of the meta. I’ve seen fewer and fewer Renfri decks in the past days. I never see NG Cultists, ST Harmony, or SY Tidecloaks. All I see is Kitty or decks meant to counter Kitty, like MO Kelly or SK Pirates.

Anyway, to sum up, we all want to see MO have some good cards and competitive archetypes. But Kitty is bad for the game. That should be clear by now; we shouldn’t be fighting each other about that. Nerfs are coming, I have no doubt. The only question is how big the nerf needs to be to stop the abuse.