Reusing high-provision cards is inherently problematic in this game

I’ve written a post on this elsewhere, but given how Witches’ Sabbath talk is back in vogue, I feel like it might be relevant subject for its own thread.

A Gwent deck is meant to have a X amount of provisions. So, if you somehow played your entire deck, you’d have played a total value of X provisions worth of cards. That’s the fundamental balancing tool of Gwent and it is the closest thing it has that is analogous to mana in other games.

Cards that let you reuse high provision cards basically break this rule. Witches’s Sabbath is the most recent one: at 10 provisions, it can resurrect often more than 20 provisions worth of cards, and you can set up it in a way that also makes whatever cards your opponent gets irrelevant. For all intents and purposes, it makes your deck play for X+whatever the provision value of resurrected cards that exceeds 10, instead of merely X. In other words: it cheats the provision system, letting you play more provisions than your deck cap allows for.

Cards that bypassed this rule would often reveal themselves problematic. Renew and Caranthir were both given provision limits to what they could target because of this. Scenarios were all given doomed because of this.

There are some cards that bypass this rule that aren’t too broken right now. Vilgefortz can setup the reuse of a lot of high provision cards, and Sigrdrifa’s Rite just brings back any unit no questions asked. They aren’t concretely problematic right now, since Vilg requires a lot of setup and playing otherwise weak cards, and much of the value of most high-end SK units is in the deploy which Sigrdrifa doesn’t trigger. But I believe they are just one or two cards away from being the dominant because of just how much better it is to simply replay your high end cards instead of playing another weaker card.

Anyway, the point is: cards that let you reuse any high provision cards essentially “add” provisions to your deck over the stated cap, and will always be a potential problem. Cards that let you replay cards somehow should have a provision limit for their targets.