Thoughts on the design of Gwent

1) Binary ain't fun. Keltullis, Sihil, scenarios are all a good examples of this. These cards boil down to a check on whether or not the deck is ready to swiftly deal with them, and if the answer is no very very often the result is a sure loss.

Gold engines in particular are the category I'm more worried about because they are generally interested by the most powercreep and can be devastating when not dealt with. Actually scratch that, it applies to bronzes as well.

This is not to say that I like pointslam fiestas cough cough Simlas cough cough. Pointslam is the simplest form of value generation, so of course it should have the least return. Boy, do I remember the times when Falibor was rated as premium pointslam.

And that doesn't mean that I like everything to be nuked either. Too much cheap control too, if you ask me. Looking at ya raids deck.

2) Base strength, Resilience, GY interaction and carryover in general

CDPR used to be very careful about these things, having learnt from Beta that they can be disastrous. Yet they now proliferate again. I find Vandergrift in particular to be very offensive. 6 points resilient unit *with a shield* and if you purify he gets resilience again. Like wtf.

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3) Artifacts. They were meant to be the great revolution introduced by homecoming, the third new class of cards. Many of them however, still lie dead to this day and have been for quite some time. Before the introduction of scenarios, all the other artifacts had been nerfed into the ground. Scenarios created a new problematic dynamic where people complained that their precious 14p cards were destroyed by a measly 5p bomb heaver. Fast forward a few years and there are only two cards in the game that can effectively deal with artifacts, but the number of artifacts is on the rise (candle e.g.). There's even a 5p which exploits locations and scenarios. And of course new generation artifacts also have resilience

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4) Learning from mistakes. Once upon a time there was a poison meta and two factions were unplayable. Then the devs stepped in and they managed to bring back in line the situation with surgical changes. Then failed expiriment came into the picture and the rest was history. Ditto for Sihil and scenarios getting procced the same turn they're played. (Scoia'tael)

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5) Blantant powercreep