In the 6 games I've played today I've faced 2 warriors/raid, cultists, knights, harmony and a kolgrim cheese deck. The same decks from last moths meta again. Over and over. STALE. There's already a post on the subreddit getting traction because Nilfgaard is as usual, everywhere. But SY gets one good deck which can compete with the meta, is complex and has a high skill ceiling? Nerfed every single patch and killed. Why? SY doesn't dominate the ladder and it's not a popular faction so why does the team insist on beating SY when its down? Collusion was specifically targeted this patch over every other deck for performing well but none of the other decks on the Meta Snapshot or decks like cultists, reavers, knights, warriors, selfwound, tactics or enslave were touched.
I find it hard to believe that the PtS/Vendor combo was so broken that it had to be immediately nerfed as a priority while combos like Skellen/Helge or all of the shenanigans you can create with Blood Eagle or Coup/Terranova won't be touched. The removal of the blindeyes tag AND a nerf to the strings provision so that it cannot be played more than twice is overkill considering that the majority of blindeyes and SY bronzes in general have been powercrept to worthlessness. "It's a good card and sees a lot of play among SY decks" was the justification for the nerf to Vendor, but couldn't the same be said of a lot of cards which are staples of their factions? And why now? Why nerf these cards before a major card release (and presumably a major balance patch) so that SY has 2 months of misery?
Collusion was a difficult deck to play in comparison to every other, and required intense management of resources and forward thinking to get the same amount of value any other deck would get for just playing a card or using a leader ability.
Frankly is seems like there is strong favoritism amongst the dev team towards their favourite factions and the factions which keep the whales playing. It's wrong and it's extremely off putting. If this is the last year of Gwent shouldn't they be spending every patch bringing us a slew of balance changes to ensure that every faction is in a healthy, fun and playable state? MO, SY and ST are hanging on with gimmick decks while SK, NR and NG have a variety of good cards and strong decks to pick from. Nerfing collusion but buffing bounty as compensation while it is fundamentally awkward and vulnerable to control and removal by design is a kick in the teeth, especially when they keep mocking us by buffing a card no one plays because it is terrible.
I would've expected more people to be up in arms about this, but seeing as SY isn't very popular it doesn't leave me with much hope for Gwentfinity, where in all likelihood all we'll see is NG getting buffed every month.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/gwent/comments/10wnvt5/the_blatant_favoritism_and_lack_of_attention_from/